4) template. Indeed, many of the essays in this volume are so enjoyable to read precisely because the ‘personal peculiarities’ (p. 4) of the writer who produced them are so boldly on display. In this respect, the unashamedly idiosyncratic essays of Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) provided Woolf with an enticing pattern for her own, and just as she tells us that Beerbohm gave us ‘himself’ in his essays—‘He was affected by private joys and sorrows, and had no gospel to preach and no learning to impart. He was himself, simply and directly … the spirit of personality permeates every word that he [wrote]’ (‘The Modern Essay’, pp. 17–18)—so in Woolf’s own essays we find ourselves heart-to-heart with the same engrossing, live-wire ‘personality’ that we also encounter in her letters and diary. T. S. Eliot made a virtue of ‘impersonality’,3 but for Woolf essay-writing was essentially a sounding-board for the self. As far as she was concerned, an essay might focus on ‘the immortality of the soul, or the rheumatism in your left shoulder, but it is primarily an expression of personal opinion’ (‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’, p. 4) and must be tinged, preferably deep-dyed, with the individuality of the writer. Another essayist who influenced Woolf was Samuel Butler (1835–1902), and in ‘The Modern Essay’ she applauds Butler for having the audacity to write about whatever took his fancy, such as ‘turtles and Cheapside’ (p. 13), just as in her own ‘Oxford Street Tide’ she alights on tortoises for sale amidst the frantic stir of the West End.

Elena Gualtieri has argued that Woolf’s customized embrace of such a conventional mode of essay-writing has shaped

the reception of [her] critical writings in the postwar years. Although during her lifetime the essays enjoyed a wider and, in Leonard Woolf’s term, ‘more catholic’ … appreciation than Woolf’s novels, in the years which followed her death and up to the late 1960s this situation was reversed, as critics began to focus almost exclusively on her activity as a novelist and relegated the essays to the traditional role of ‘minor’ genre, dutifully included in studies of her work, but dismissed as more imperfect and less challenging than her fiction.4

However, Gualtieri is one of a number of recent critics to suggest that if we continue to view the essays as marginal to Woolf’s achievement we shall fail to do justice to work of central importance to her canon. It would be exaggerating to suggest that any one of Woolf’s essays is as demanding as her great novels, but many repay the close attentiveness we normally reserve for her fiction.

For while the form of Woolf’s essays may be conventional, what she has to say in them is rather more mould-breaking. By means of the unhurried and elegant prose of ‘Modern Fiction’, for example, Woolf sets out her own radically liberated vision of the novel in general and the treatment of character in particular. So although her critique of the ‘materialism’ of Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy is marked by her old-fashioned habit of referring to herself as ‘we’, the sheer wallop she brings to her account of the novel at a new frontier could not be more memorable:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old … Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged: life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? (p. 9)

Woolf’s now legendary contrast between life as we really experience it in all its fugitive and imponderable inwardness (and which she sought to express in her representation of the roaming thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay, for example) and ‘a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged’ has become one of the most quoted tenets of Modernist doctrine, yet it turns on a metaphor—a ‘gig’ was a two-wheeled, one-horse light carriage—which would have had a distinctly antiquated ring to it even at the time it was written (though, of course, it could not have been more apt for a thrust at the backwardness of Bennett, Wells, and Galsworthy).

Like other Modernists, such as Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, Woolf tended to innovate and explicate in companion texts, the most developed examples of this tendency being Orlando and A Room of One’s Own and The Years and Three Guineas. Similarly, in the same way that Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ essays illumine ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land, so Woolf, in such pieces as ‘Modern Fiction’, ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, ‘Character in Fiction’, ‘“Impassioned Prose”’, ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, ‘The New Biography’, and ‘Women and Fiction’, helped clear the ground not only for her own Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves, but also for the novels of Jean Rhys, Rosamund Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, and the many other writers who came after them, both men and women (such as Jeanette Winterson), who all, in their different ways, register their affinity with the more singular and unshackled novel Woolf had helped to free from the stranglehold of tradition. In ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’, Woolf refers to her own time as ‘an age of fragments’ (p. 26), but her tone is neither despondent nor defeatist. Instead, she is invigorated by the sound of disintegration all around her, stimulated by the possibility of artistic renewal, and this exultation comes out in her essays, where she rejoices in the possibility of new beginnings, pleading only for tolerance and imagination in the face of almost unprecedented cultural upheaval.