S. Eliot, who was on the fringe of it—did more to establish the possibilities of literary innovation, or to demonstrate that such innovation must be brought about by minds familiar with the innovations of the past. This is true originality. It was Eliot who said of Jacob’s Room that in that book she had freed herself from any compromise between the traditional novel and her original gift; it was the freedom he himself sought in The Waste Land, published in the same year, a freedom that was dependent upon one’s knowing with intimacy that with which compromise must be avoided, so that the knowledge became part of the originality. In fact she had ‘gobbled’ her father’s books to a higher purpose than he could have understood.

Frank Kermode

INTRODUCTION

WOOLF’S essays bear no resemblance to a wonky table and worry about wobble was the last thing that prompted the overview that follows. Though these disclaimers may well surprise, even perplex you, they are far from uncalled-for, because, as Woolf puts it rather sharply near the beginning of ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’, ‘Books should stand on their own feet … If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady’ (p. 146). Thankfully, no such wedge is needed for this selection as all the pieces that it gathers together have the sturdy, stand-alone appeal of Woolf at her most engaging. Her essays, unlike her novels, require relatively little in the way of prefatory or explanatory ‘shoring up’ for today’s reader and they have been left largely to speak for themselves.

Although Woolf’s essays are only bite-sized when compared with the rich feast of her celebrated novels and other book-length works, such as A Room of One’s Own (1929) or Three Guineas (1938), they offer plenty to chew on and much to relish. They are best savoured at leisure and should not be viewed as either relatively unappetizing nibbles or mere hors d’oeuvres to be toyed with half-heartedly before the more sumptuous main dishes of the Woolf canon arrive at the table. Indeed, a number of the essays (‘Character in Fiction’, ‘On Being Ill’, and ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, for example) are gourmet concoctions in their own right. Nevertheless, this present selection has been made with at least one eye on helping the reader enrich his or her comprehension of that more renowned body of work, and, in particular, with a view to enabling him or her to achieve a better understanding of Woolf’s vision and practice as a writer of fiction; her fascination with (auto) biography; her idiosyncratic commitment to the feminist movement; and her varied and vivacious response to the (increasingly imperilled) world around her. Furthermore, many of these essays are required reading not only for those who wish to deepen their appreciation of Woolf’s œuvre, but for students of the Modernist movement as a whole. Accordingly, their arrangement is also intended to underline Woolf’s distinctive contribution to four of the key achievements of Modernist literature— its radical reconfiguration of prose forms; its embrace of a new and subversive approach to life-writing; its promotion of feminist discourse; and its responsiveness to the bustle and spectacle of modernity.

In writing essays, Rachel Bowlby has remarked, Woolf ‘was directly following her father’s footsteps, in a move that was composed of both rivalry and honour; in fact she took over where he left off, quite literally, since she began publishing.… just after he died’, in 1904.1 However, as Andrew McNeillie has observed, Woolf’s career as an essayist did not exactly start with a bang.

An unsigned review in a now largely forgotten weekly … of a still more forgotten work by a forgotten author can hardly be described as an arresting début. It was about as ordinary a beginning, promising nothing, as it is possible to imagine; and as such, as a modestly undertaken professional exercise, it was wholly in character. For Virginia Woolf served an extraordinarily fastidious, self-effacing apprenticeship in what was once called the art of letters.2

While a small number of pieces in this volume were in origin reviews (‘The Feminine Note in Fiction’, ‘Women Novelists’, ‘The Modern Essay’, and ‘The New Biography’), and others (‘Character in Fiction’, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, ‘Professions for Women’, and ‘Craftsmanship’) began life as talks, the main focus is not on the many essays Woolf produced in the form of book appraisals, but on pieces in which we sense most strongly that she is writing uninhibitedly for her own and her readers’ delight. As she remarks at three different points in ‘The Modern Essay’, in words which are applicable to the best of her own contributions to that form:

The principle which controls [the essay] is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. (p. 13)

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labour or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter. (pp. 14–15)

Vague as all definitions are, a good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out. (p. 22)

None of the essays collected in this edition could be misidentified as the work of any other writer but Woolf and in many of them she achieves a remarkable sense of pleasurable intimacy with the reader, as if she were speaking to us, relaxed and unchivvied, across a recessed and encurtained café table.

At a time when Modernists such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot turned their backs on the ‘amiable garrulity’ (‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’, p. 5) of the late-Victorian and Edwardian ‘personal essay’ (p. 3), Woolf embraced this belletristic model as an appealingly ‘egoistical’ (p.