REVIEW OF ARTICLE: “HOW SHOULD ONE READ A BOOK,” BY VIRGINIA WOOLF

Review of Article: “How One Should Read a Book,” by Virginia Woolf

Publication Source: The Yale Review, Autumn 1926, Volume 16, No. 1. Reprinted in June 2008 in The Yale Review

Subjects: Processes of Reading, Art of Reading, Literary Appreciation, Literary Interpretation, and Literary Judgment

Background: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, publisher, and critic. She is considered one of the most important novelists of the Twentieth Century.

“How One Should Read a Book” was originally a speech that Virginia Woolf gave in January of 1926 at a private girls’ school in Kent, England. She revised the speech into an essay that was published in September 1926 in The Yale Review. Also, the essay was included her book, The Second Common Reader, published in 1932.

The Yale Review reprinted Woolf’s essay “How One Should Read a Book” in their June 2008 issue and archived Woolf’s essay on their website at the following link: https://yalereview.org/article/virginia-woolf-essay-how-should-read-book#:~:text=To%20read%20a%20book%20well,books%2C%20begin%20by%20writing%20them.

A PDF of Woolf’s essay as it appeared in The Yale Review’s June 2008 issue can be downloaded from Wiley Online using the following link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0044-0124.00468. The PDF version includes an introduction by The Yale Review as to why they choose to republish the essay.

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INTRODUCTION

“The mind seems (‘seems,’ for all is obscure that takes place in the mind) to go through two processes in reading. One might be called the actual reading; the other the after reading. During the actual reading, when we hold the book in our hands, there are incessant distractions and interpretations. New impressions are always completing or canceling the old. One’s judgement is suspended for one does not know what comes next. Surprise, admiration, boredom, interest, succeed each other in such quick succession that when at last, the end is reached, one is for the most part in a state of complete bewilderment. Is it good? or bad? What kind of book is it? How good a book is it? The friction of reading and the emotion of reading beat up too much dust to let us find clear answers to these questions …. [in the after reading process] different details which have accumulated in reading assemble themselves in their proper places. The book takes on a definite shape; …. Holding this complete shape in mind it now becomes necessary to arrive at some opinion of the book’s merits, for though it is possible to receive the greatest pleasure and excitement from the first process, the actual reading, though this is of utmost importance, it is not so profound or so lasting as the pleasure of the second process – the after reading – is finished, and we hold the clear, secure, and (to the best of our powers) complete in our minds.”[i]

In her essay, “How One Should Read a Book,” Virginia Woolf finds that the reader of a book performs two processes when reading a book. The first process is the “actual reading” of a book, and the second process is the “after reading” of a book, when the reader has completed reading a book.

The process of the actual reading of a book is the reader reading a book and working to appreciate what the author is saying in their book. This process may be best characterized by the following quote from the English novelist William Thackeray (1811-1863): “Next to excellence is the appreciation of excellence.”[ii] In her essay, Woolf will draw out what excellence is in an author and how the reader is to appreciate an author’s excellence by working to understand the intent and design of an author’s book.

The after reading process is when the reader has completed the author’s book and judges the merit of the author’s book by comparing the author read to other author’s the reader has read, and by asking and answering questions about what the author has accomplished. Thackeray’s quote remains pertinent. Excellence is found in the author by the reader justly criticizing the author after completing the author’s book. What is importantly achieved in this process, to quote Woolf, is that “…we arrive at our standard of values, and decide in the end that the book we have just read is of this kind or that, has merit in that degree or in this.”[iii]

Woolf believes that a reader adhering to the two reading processes will realize that “…to read after this fashion is to be a reader whom writers respect. It is by the means of such readers that masterpieces are helped into the world.”[iv]

Three important matters on Woolf’s reading processes and essay.

First, Woolf states she is not setting laws to be followed when reading, but she is suggesting an approach for readers to consider, or is suggesting an approach to stimulate readers to find an approach of their own.

Second, Woolf’s focus is on reading for pleasure and looks at primarily reading imaginative literature, novels and poetry. She sees reading imaginative works for pleasure offering the reader the greatest intensity in reading and the greatest use of their powers of mind. Further, she sees everyone as equal in their reading for pleasure; that everyone, if they love reading and are willing to work at their reading, can apply their powers of imagination, understanding, and criticism to their reading.

And third, I think the overall importance of Woolf’s essay is that it is well conceived, well-stated, and has momentum as she moves from one point to another in her essay. The reading approach she suggests makes one cognizant of a reading approach that uses one’s mental abilities to interpret and criticize an author’s book.

Given that Woolf’s essay conveys her thoughts well, I have quoted her extensively where necessary so as not to interrupt the flow of her thoughts and her supporting examples. If you wish to get a quick view of the meaning of her essay, rather than reading my entire review, go to sections V and VI, the last two sections of my review. Section V contains verbatim the last two paragraphs of her essay. She summarizes her approach to reading in the second last paragraph and in the last paragraph makes assertions on the importance of reading. And in Section VI I have excerpted key quotes from her essay that explain her approach to reading.

I will organize my review of Woolf’s essay as follows:

I. The Setting Virginia Woolf Establishes for the Reader and Then the Questions Raised of How One Should Read a Book

II. The Incipient Orientation for a Reader to the Reading Processes: Realizing the Differences Between Various Kinds of Books, and Realizing There is an Intent and Design to Authors Books

III. The First Reading Process, the Actual Reading of a Book

A. Taking the Author’s Side

B. The Difference Between Novelists

C. The Qualities of Artistry and the Qualities of Mind for the Reader to Understand Artistry

D. Respite Reading to Restore the Reader’s Mental Powers

E. The Reading of Poetry

IV. The Second Reading Process, the After Reading: Judging (Criticizing) the Merits of a Book

V. Two Part Closing to Woolf’s Essay

VI. Summarizing Woolf’s Reading Processes in Quotes from Her Essay

The way I have organized my review for Sections I-V is how Woolf’s essay proceeds from beginning to end. Section VI will use key quotations in Woolf’s essay to summarize her reading approach. All quotations used throughout my review are taken from the PDF version of her essay and not the online version on The Yale Review’s Website.

I. THE SETTING WOOLF ESTABLISHES FOR THE READER AND THEN THE QUESTIONS RAISED OF HOW ONE SHOULD READ A BOOK

Woolf starts by asking to imagine one’s self entering a reading room in a house to read a book. The reading room has accumulated a number of books of all types (fiction, nonfiction, reference, etc.) that have been put there by a variety of people with a variety of tastes. She then asks, “Now one may well ask oneself, strolling into such a room as this, how am I to read these books? What is the right way to set about it? They [the books] are so many and so various. My appetite is so fitful and capricious. What am I to do to get the utmost possible pleasure out of them? And is it pleasure, or profit, or what is it that I should seek?”[v]

Woolf next lays out her intent for a reader to realize an approach to reading for the occasion of entering a reading room:

“One may think about reading as much as one chooses, but no one is going to lay down laws about it. Here in this room, if nowhere else, we breathe the air of freedom. Here simple and learned, man and woman are alike. For though reading seems so simple – a mere matter of knowing the alphabet – it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful anybody knows anything about it. Paris is the capital of France; King John signed the Magna Charta; those are facts, those can be taught; but how are we to teach people so to read ‘Paradise Lost’ as to see that it is a great poem, or ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ so as to see that it is a good novel. How are we to learn the art of reading for ourselves? Without attempting to lay down laws upon a subject that has not been legalized, I will make a few suggestions, which may serve to show you how not to read, or to stimulate you to think out better methods of your own.”[vi]

The key questions here are how should one read a book (the title of the essay) and how is one to learn the art of reading. I consider these questions as equivalent to each other and as such are what Woolf will seek to answer.

II. THE INCIPIENT ORIENTATION FOR A READER TO THE READING PROCESSES: REALIZING THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN VARIOUS KINDS OF BOOKS, AND REALIZING THERE IS AN INTENT AND DESIGN TO AUTHORS BOOKS

Woolf starts defining her reading approach by stating that readers tend to treat all books as being the same when, in fact, books differ from one another:

“And directly we begin to ask how should one read a book we are faced by the fact that books differ; there are poems, novels, biographies on the book shelf there; each differs from the other as a tiger differs from a tortoise, a tortoise from an elephant. Our attitude must always be changing, it is clear. From different books we must ask different qualities. Simple as this sounds people are always behaving as if all books were of the same species – as if they were only tortoises or nothing but tigers.”[vii]

The failure of readers to distinguish among the types books leads readers to get frustrated when they find that a historical chronology is not accurately followed in a book, or are delighted by being told the number of petals in a particular flower. This is to stay at surface level of description and Woolf states readers are better served using their time and temperament “…for worthier objects if you try to make out before you begin to read what qualities you expect of a novelist, what of a poet, what of a biographer. The tortoise is bald and shiny; the tiger has a thick coat of yellow fur. So books too differ: one has fur, the other has it baldness.”[viii]

However, books are not at times so easily classified by species, or type, and have a tendency “…of breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves.”[ix] Given this how does the reader then approach authors on a bookshelf to determine which species their books belong. Here Woolf posits the gateway to her overall reading approach: that, when reading a book, the reader must follow the intent and design of the author’s book and in doing so not impose their own design on the author’s book. She importantly states:

“But if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase, that each book was written by a pen, which, consciously, or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string [emphasis added].”[x]

Having been orientated about how to enter an author’s world by realizing that there is an intent and a design to an author’s book that is to be followed by the reader, Woolf sets out to give her two processes of reading a book.

III. THE FIRST READING PROCESS, THE ACTUAL READING OF A BOOK

A. Taking the Author’s Side

The reader determines the author’s intent and design by the practice of taking the author’s side – by sympathizing, not by judging, what the author is doing; by working along aside the author as if writing the book with the author. To do this Woolf states:

“To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them [emphasis added]. For this is certainly true – one cannot write the most ordinary little story, attempt to describe the simplest event-meeting a beggar, shall we say in the street, without coming up against the difficulties that the greatest of novelists have had to face.”[xi]

One embarks into the actual reading a book by collaborating with the author, by seeing the world the author has created. Also, the scenario of how a writer would handle the simplest event of meeting a beggar in the street gives Woolf entree into drawing a rough classification of how some major novelists would do this, which is the subject of the next subheading.

B. The Difference Between Novelists

Woolf shows the different perspective that three novelists (Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy) would employ in writing about the event of meeting a beggar in the street. Each author’s perspective would be different based on their design and intent, and based on their artistry.

Woolf states that Daniel Defoe:

“…is a master of narrative. His prime effort will be to reduce the beggar’s story to perfect order and simplicity. This happened first, that next, the other thing third. He will put in nothing, however attractive, that will tire the reader unnecessarily, or divert his attention from what he wishes him to know. He will also make us believe, since he is a master, not of romance or of comedy, but narrative, that everything that happened is true. He will be extremely precise …. Further, he will choose a type of sentence which is flowing but not too full, exact but not epigrammatic. His aim will be to present the thing itself without distortion, from his own angle of vision. He will meet the subject face to face, four-square, without turning aside for a moment to point out that this was tragic, or that was beautiful; and his aim is perfectly achieved.”[xii]

Jane Austen would be interested in the beggar’s story, but portray it from a different perspective than Defoe. Meeting a beggar outdoors is not her type of setting and she is a master of characterization. To quote Woolf:

“…she would have been interested in the beggar’s story. But she would have seen at once that for her purposes the whole incident must be transformed. Streets and open air adventures mean nothing to her artistically. It is character that interests her. She would at once make the character into a comfortable elderly man of the upper middle classes, seated his fireside at his ease. Then instead of plunging into the story vigorously and veraciously, she will write a few paragraphs of accurate and artfully seasoned introduction, summing up the circumstances and sketching the character of the gentlemen she wishes us to know.”[xiii]

Austen would give the elderly man the opening dialogue to reveal his thoughts. Then, his daughter, will be given a dialogue to reveal her own thoughts on matters. And, then Austen, will view the elderly man from her view. The multiple points of view of the characters form Austen’s artistry and the reader sees the elderly gentleman, the main character, “…from three points of view at once; as he sees himself; as his daughter sees him, and as he is seen by the marvelous eye of that invisible lady Jane Austen herself. All three meet in one, and thus we can pass round her characters free, apparently, from any guidance of our own.”[xiv]

Thomas Hardy’s portrayal of the beggar would be different from either Defoe’s portrayal or Austen’s.

The first the outdoors is a crucial setting for Hardy and “The street will be transformed into a vast and somber heath.”[xv]

The second is that the man or women as the beggar will be of a larger physical stature, but at the same time more indistinct as a character because Hardy is subjecting his character to the obscurer forces of fate. In doing this Hardy is showing the darker side of human nature, which distinguishes him from Defoe and Austen. Woolf draws out the distinction of a novelist either focusing on the light side or the dark side of human nature. She states:

“[Hardy will show that] …the relations of this human being [the beggar] will not be towards other people, but towards the heath, towards man as a law giver, towards the powers which are in control of man’s destiny. Once more our perspective will be completely changed .… The direct literal statement of Defoe is gone. There is none of the exact clearness brilliance of Jane Austen. Indeed, if we come to Hardy from one of these great writers we shall exclaim as first that he is ‘melodramatic’ or ‘unreal’ compared to them. But we should bethink us that there are at least two sides of the human soul; the light side and the dark side. In company, the light side of the mind is exposed; in solitude, the dark side. Both are equally real, equally important. But a novelist will always tend to expose one rather than the other [emphasis added]”[xvi]

Hardy is a novelist of the dark side and, in portraying the beggar, will create his own perspective. He will steer away from direct steady light on the face of the beggar, as well as on other characters, which would be the opposite of Austen’s close observation of her characters. Hardy’s characters:

“… come into contact with the moors, sheep, the sky and the stars, and in their solitude are directly at the mercy of the gods. If Jane Austen’s characters are real in the drawing room, they would not exist at all upon the top of Stonehenge. Feeble and clumsy in drawing rooms, Hardy’s people are large-limbed and vigorous out of doors. To achieve his purpose Hardy is neither literal … nor deft and pointed like Jane Austen. He is cumbersome, involved, and metaphorical. Where Austen describes manners, he describes nature. Where she is matter of fact, he is romantic and poetical. As both are great artists, each is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and will not be confusing us (as so many lesser writers do by introducing two different kinds of reality into the same book).”[xvii]

Each novelist creating and adhering to their own perspective leads Woolf to define what makes excellence in a writer and what is required by the reader in reading such writers in order to understand their excellence. This is subject of the next subject heading.

C. The Qualities of Artistry and the Qualities of Mind for the Reader to Understand Artistry

Woolf ponders that one would wish Defoe, Austen, and Hardy to be less exacting in their writing, but that cannot be the case for them. It is part of their artistry and excellence to create their perspectives and this places demands on the reader on how to read them properly, as well as to read other great writers properly. To quote Woolf:

“Yet it is very difficult not to wish them less scrupulous. Frequent are the complaints that Jane Austen is too prosaic, Thomas Hardy too melodramatic. And we have to remind ourselves that it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us. We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision. It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend and break us [emphasis added]. To go from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith, from Richardson to Kipling, is to be wrenched and distorted .… If then, this is true – that books are of very different types, and to read them rightly we have to bend our imaginations powerfully, first one way, then another – it is clear that reading is one of the most arduous and exhausting of occupations.” [emphasis added][xviii]

The right reading of an author of an imaginative work is challenging. It requires reading each author for their individual vision and artistry, which is their excellence. It requires holding in abeyance our preconceptions and previous experience in order to understand the current experience that the author is giving one. Further, it requires concentrating one’s attention and one’s imagination to comprehend the situations in authors stories or poems that may be difficult and complex at first to understand.

Since the reader’s powers of attention, imagination, and concentration are taxed during reading imaginative works, a respite from this kind of reading is needed and this is the subject of the next subject heading.

D. Respite Reading to Restore the Reader’s Powers of Imagination

The reader can be absorbed in using their mental resources of attention and imagination in what they are reading and then hit the doldrums, or stagnant, no longer being able to attend to what they are reading: “Often the pages fly before us and we seem, so keen is our interest, to be living and not even holding the volume in our hands. But the more exciting the book, the more danger of over-reading. The symptoms are familiar. Suddenly the book becomes dull as ditchwater and heavy as lead. We yawn and cannot attend.”[xix]

The solution is to take a respite by reading what Woolf terms “hybrid books,” books that contain a combination of stories and facts such as biographies, autobiographies, and histories: “All biographies and memoirs, all the hybrid books, which are largely made up of facts, serve to restore us to the power of reading real books-that is to say works of pure imagination [emphasis added].”[xx]

Woolf uses the biographer’s perspective of focusing on the facts of the lives of men and women to create stories that bring together the circumstances, thoughts, and complexity of their lives and times. In this, Woolf also distinguishes between biographers creating stories based on fact and the novelist creating stories based on imagination and not fully on fact. To quote Woolf:

“There is nothing more interesting than to pick one’s way about among those vast depositories of facts to make up the lives of men and women .…There is, too, a quality in facts, an emotion which comes from knowing that men and women actually did and suffered these things, which only the greatest novelist can surpass. Captain Scott, starving and freezing to death in the snow affects us as deeply as any made-up story of adventure by Conrad or Defoe; but it affects us differently. The biography differs from the novel. To ask a biographer to give us the same kind of pleasure that we get from a novelist is to misuse and misread him. Directly he says ‘John Jones was born at five-thirty in the morning of August 13, 1862,’ he has committed himself, he has focused his lens upon fact, and if he then begins to romance, the perspective becomes blurred, we grow suspicious, and our faith in his integrity as a writer is destroyed. In the same way fact destroys fiction. If Thackeray, for example, had quoted an actual newspaper account of the Battle of Waterloo in ‘Vanity Fair’ the whole fabric of his story would have been destroyed, as a stone destroys a bubble.”[xxi]

When hybrid books have served their recuperative purpose to restore the reader’s concentration and imaginative powers, a return to reading imaginative literature is to be done. To quote Woolf:

“But is it undoubted that these hybrid books, these warehouses and depositories of facts, play a great part in resting the brain and restoring the zest of its imagination…stimulates our interest in creation and rouses our wish to see the work beautifully and powerfully done by a Flaubert or a Tolstoi. Moreover, however interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction, and gradually we become impatient of their weakness and diffuseness, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make for themselves, and our eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction [emphasis added].”[xxii]

Restoring the reader’s powers of concentration and imagination leads Woolf to examine the reading of poetry which makes the most demand on the reader’s mental powers.

E. The Reading of Poetry

Woolf’s assessment of reading poetry has the most concentrated content in her essay, taking about a page and a quarter of her 10-page essay. I am going to quote her extensively as not to misconstrue her since her insights are important.

Woolf emphasizes the importance of bringing the reader’s full powers of application to the reading of poetry and what compels the reader to read poetry:

“It is necessary to have in hand an immense reserve of imaginative energy in order to attack the steeps of poetry. Here are none of those gradual introductions, those resemblances to the familiar world of daily life with which the novelist entices us into his world of imagination. All is violent, opposite, unrelated. But the various causes, such as bad books, the worry of carrying on life efficiently, the intermittent but powerful shocks dealt to us by beauty, and the incalculable impulses of our minds and bodies frequently put us into that state of mind in which poetry is necessary.”[xxiii]

Woolf precedes to state that the reader in seeking to read poetry is engaging the darker side of the mind, or seeking solitude:

“The sight of a crocus in a garden will suddenly bring to mind all the spring days that have ever been. One then desires the general, not the particular, the whole, not the details; to turn uppermost the dark side of the mind; to be in contact with silence, solitude, and all men and women and not the particular Richard, or that particular Anne. Metaphors are more expressive than plain statement [emphasis added].[xxiv]

Then Woolf states how to read poetry:

“Thus in order to read poetry rightly, one must be in a rash, an extreme, a generous state of mind in which many of the supports and comforts are done without. Its power of make-believe, its representative power is dispensed with in favor of its extremities and extravagances. The representation is often at a very far remove from the thing represented, so that we have to use all our energies of mind to grasp the relation between, for example the song of a nightingale and the images and ideas which that song stirs in the mind. Thus reading poetry often seems a state of rhapsody in which rhyme and metre and sound stir in the mind as wine and dance stir the body, and we read on, understanding with the senses, not the intellect, in a state of intoxication. Yet all this intoxication and intensity of delight depend upon the exactitude and truth of the image, on its being the counterpart of the reality within. Remote and extravagant as some of Shakespeare’s images seem, far-fetched and ethereal as some of Keat’s, at the moment of reading they seem the cap and culmination of the thought; its final expression. But it is useless to labor the matter in cold blood. Anyone who has read a poem with pleasure will remember the sudden conviction, the sudden recollection (for it seems sometimes as if we were about to say, or had in some previous existence already said, what Shakespeare is now saying), which accompany the reading of poetry, and give it its exultation and intensity. But such reading is attended, whether consciously or unconsciously, with the utmost stretch and vigilance of faculties, of the reason no less than the imagination. We are always verifying the poet’s statements, making a flying comparison to the best of our powers between the beauty he makes outside and the beauty we are aware within. For the humblest among us is endowed with the power of comparison. The simplest (provided he loves reading) has that already within him to which he makes what is given him-whether by poet or novelist-correspond.”[xxv]

The final portion of the above quote mentions that the reader compares the imagery and reality that the poet is presenting to him or her to their own internal understandings to make judgements on what is being read. Comparison is a form of criticism and this leads Woolf to the second reading process, the after reading process, when the reader has completed reading an imaginative work and now judges the work. Woolf considers this process as necessary as the first process and more so.

Before moving to the second reading process, I will summarize the first reading process.

The first reading process is to understand the intent and design of the author’s book – to interpret the author’s book. To do this the reader takes the author’s side to understand and interpret the author’s story and point of view, and do this the reader sees himself, or herself, as partnering with the author to write their book. Also, it is suspending one’s judgement of the author’s book as being right or wrong, or good or bad. The use of such criteria are premature without understanding the intent and design of the author’s book. Further to discover and to understand the intent and design of the author’s book is demanding and difficult work because every author, especially a great one, brings to bear a perspective, vision, and artistry that are unique to them and therefore require the upmost use of the reader’s powers of attention and imagination to interpret the author’s book.

IV. THE SECOND READING PROCESS, THE AFTER READING: JUDGING (CRITICIZING) THE MERITS OF A BOOK

Having completed reading the author’s book, the reader enters the second reading process of judging the author’s book on such criteria as to whether the author’s book is good or bad. This is to make evaluative judgements on the author’s book. In the following quote, Woolf states the contrast between the first reading process and the second reading process and then focuses on the reader’s experience in the first process so as to see why the reader’s careful reading of the author’s book in the first process precludes criticizing the author’s book:

“Reading is not merely sympathizing and understanding; it is also criticizing and judging. Hitherto our endeavor has been to read books as a writer writes them. We have been trying to understand, to appreciate, to interpret, to sympathize. But now, when the book is finished, the reader must leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend; he must become the judge. And this is no mere figure of speech. The mind seems (‘seems’ for all is obscure that takes place in the mind) to go through two processes in reading. One might be called the actual reading; the other the after reading. During the actual reading when we hold the book in our hands, there are incessant distractions and interruptions. New impressions are always completing or canceling the old. One’s judgement is suspended, for one does not know what is coming next. Surprise, admiration, boredom, interest succeed each other in such quick succession, that when, at last, the end is reached, one is for the most part in a state of complete bewilderment. Is it good? or bad? What kind of book is it? How good of a book is it? The friction of reading and the emotion of reading beat up too much dust to let us find clean answers to these questions. If we are asked our opinion, we cannot give it.”[xxvi]

During the careful reading of interpreting the author’s book the reader has a lot to contend with. But, when the reader is done reading the author’s book, the reader now is ready to criticize the author’s book in order to find the significant values the author’s book has for the reader, and in order to achieve full satisfaction in the reader’s mind of conceiving what the reader values in the author’s book.

Woolf finds the evaluative process of criticizing an author’s book a combination of the mysterious and the deliberative. The mysterious in that one needs not to think about the book read, to find something else to do instead, and to let the what has been read take its course in the mind. Then through unconscious mechanisms of the mind, the meanings of the book read unexpectedly emerge into a person’s mind. But once the unconscious parts of the mind have done their work, there needs to be a conscious deliberative approach by the reader to criticize the book read. Woolf considers this deliberative function on the reader’s part very important in the reader figuring out and finalizing the value for the reader of the book that has been read. To quote Woolf on both the unconscious assembly of the book read and then the deliberative criticisms of the book read:

“Then perhaps it is better to take up some different pursuit – to walk, to talk, to dig, to listen to music. The book upon which we spent so much time and thought fades entirely out of sight. But [from the workings of the unconscious mind] suddenly, as one is picking a snail from a rose, tying a shoe, perhaps, doing something distant and different, the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete. Some process seems to have been finished without one’s being aware of it. The different details which have accumulated in reading assemble themselves in their proper places. The book takes on a definite shape; it become a castle, a cowshed, a gothic ruin, as the case may be. Now one can think of the book as a whole, and the book as a whole is different and gives one a different emotion from the book received currently in several different parts. Its symmetry and proportion, its confusion and distortion can cause great delight or great disgust apart from the pleasure given by each detail as it is separately realized. Holding this complete shape in mind it now becomes necessary to arrive at some opinion of the book’s merits, for though it is possible to receive the greatest pleasure from the first process, the actual reading, though this is of the utmost importance, it is not so profound or so lasting as the pleasure we get when the second process – the after reading – is finished and we hold the book clear and secure, and (to the best of our powers) complete in our mind. [emphasis added]”[xxvii]

The reader in deliberatively judging the merits of the author’s book must first rely on themselves to criticize the author’s book and not seek out the critics. Woolf states:

“But how, we may ask, are we to decide any of these questions – is it good, or is it bad? – how good is it, how bad is it? Not much help can be looked for from the outside. Critics abound; criticisms pullulate; but minds differ too much to admit of close correspondence in matters of detail, and nothing is more disastrous than to crush one’s own foot into another person’s shoe. When we want to decide a particular case, we can best help ourselves, not by reading criticism, but by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgement which we have gradually formulated in the past. [emphasis added]”[xxviii]

Woolf uses the analogy of a wardrobe closet that is in the reader’s mind that contains past books read to guide how the reader is to criticize the book just read. She does this by giving a specific example. Further she shows how the reader is better served by forming their own judgements first of the author’s book before going to critical commentary on the author’s book:

“There they hang in the wardrobe of our mind – shapes of the books we have read, as we hung them up and put them away when we had done with them. If we just read ‘Clarissa Harlowe’, for example, let us see how it shows up against the shape of ‘Anna Karenina.’ At once the outline of the two books are cut out against each other as a house with it chimneys bristling and it gables sloping out against the harvest moon. At once Richardson’s qualities – his verbosity, his obliqueness – are contrasted with Tolstoi’s brevity and directness. And what is the reason of this approach? And how does our emotion at different crises of the two books compare? And what must we attribute to the eighteenth century, and what to Russia and the translator? But the questions which suggestion themselves are innumerable. They ramify infinitely, and many of them are apparently irrelevant. Yet it is by asking them and pursuing the answers as far as we can go that we arrive at our standard of values, and decide in the end that the book just read is of this kind or that, has merit in that degree or this. And it is now, when we have kept closely to our own impression, formulated, independently our own judgement, that we can profitably help ourselves to the great critics … It is when we can best defend our own opinions that we can most profit from theirs. [emphasis added]”[xxix]

The reader’s criticism of an author’s book finalizes the reading of a book. Putting down an author’s book after reading it, especially a good or great author’s book, with no further thought about it is not sufficient because it leaves one’s reading incomplete. The reader needs to criticize an author’s book to determine the substance and value of an author’s book for the reader, and to organize and store the substance and the value of the author’s book in their mind to guide their future reading. The reader having spent so much time and effort in the first process of interpreting a book justifies the second process of the reader criticizing a book and establishing a book’s value for the reader. And, by Woolf’s assessment, as satisfying as it is to read a book, the greater satisfaction, or pleasure, comes from judging a book.

V. TWO PART CLOSING TO WOOLF’S ESSAY

The last two paragraphs of Woolf’s work are quoted verbatim below. In the second last paragraph, Woolf summarizes her reading approach. The last two sentences, which are very important, she states purposefulness of her reading approach. And, the last paragraph goes beyond giving a justification of a reading approach to stating that the love of reading has a higher functional plane than any particular approach to reading; that the love of reading gives us the intangibles of personal pleasure, which cannot be readily explained but, if these intangibles could ultimately be explained, the explanation would be that the love of reading broadens the individual reader’s mind and is a civilizing force for society.

The last two paragraphs of Woolf’s essay are:

“So, then – to sum up the different points we have reached in this essay – have we found any answer to our question, how should we read a book? Clearly, no answer that will do for everyone; but perhaps a few suggestions. In the first place, a good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can. In the next place, he will judge with the upmost severity. Every book, he will remember, has the right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people. This is an outline which can be filled in at taste or leisure, but to read something after this fashion is to be a reader whom writers respect. It is by means of such readers that masterpieces are helped into the world [emphasis added].

If the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such excuse is needed. It is true that we can get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure – mysterious, unknown, useless as it is – is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgement when secrets are revealed that the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out of caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat around the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.”[xxx]

VI. SUMMARIZING WOOLF’S READING PROCESS IN QUOTES FROM HER ESSAY

The following excerpted quotes from Woolf’s essay will provide a summary of her suggested approach of reading having two processes, the reading of a book and then the criticizing of a book:

A. Entering Into the Reading Processes

- Before starting a method of reading the reader should realize that, “…each book was written by a pen, which, consciously, or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.”[xxxi]

B. The First Reading Process, the Actual Reading of a Book

- The reader needs to be on the author’s side when reading the author’s book – to understand the author first before judging the author: “To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them.”[xxxii]
- A distinction among novelists is that they can treat human nature differently, either depicting the light side or dark side of human nature: “… there are at least two sides of the human soul; the light side and the dark side. In company, the light side of the mind is exposed; in solitude, the dark side. Both are equally real, equally important. But a novelist will always tend to expose one rather than the other.”[xxxiii]

- Reading the works of imaginative literature is difficult work and complex given each author’s artistry: “… it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us. We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision. It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They [great writers} bend and break us …. are of very different types, and to read them rightly we have to bend our imaginations powerfully, first one way, then another – it is clear that reading is one of the most arduous and exhausting of occupations.”[xxxiv]

- It is contended that imaginative works of literature are the best reading: “… reading real books-that is to say works of pure imagination …. however interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction, and gradually we become impatient of their weakness and diffuseness, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make for themselves, and our eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction.”[xxxv]
- When reading poetry, the reader is seeking solitude: “One then desires the general, not the particular, the whole, not the details; to turn uppermost the dark side of the mind; to be in contact with silence, solitude, and all men and women and not the particular Richard, or that particular Anne. Metaphors are more expressive than plain statement.”[xxxvi]

C. Second Reading Process, Criticizing a Book

- The reader needs to criticize the author’s book because it connects the actual reading process of the author’s book with the after reading process of the author’s book and finalizes the reading of an author’s book: “… it now becomes necessary to arrive at some opinion of the book’s merits, for though it is possible to receive the greatest pleasure from the first process, the actual reading, though this is of the utmost importance, it is not so profound or so lasting as the pleasure we get when the second process – the after reading – is finished and we hold the book clear and secure, and (to the best of our powers) complete in our mind.”[xxxvii]

- In criticizing a book, the reader needs to use their own thoughts and not rely on critics: “When we want to decide a particular case, we can best help ourselves, not by reading criticism, but by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgement which we have gradually formulated in the past …. when we have kept closely to our own impression, formulated, independently our own judgement, that we can profitably help ourselves to the great critics…. It is when we can best defend our own opinions that we can most profit from theirs.”[xxxiii]

D. The Results Achieved by the Reading Processes

- [The reader having followed the two processes of reading] “… to read something after this fashion is to be a reader whom writers respect. It is by means of such readers that masterpieces are helped into the world.”[xxxix]

FOOTNOTES

[i] “How Should One Read a Book”, The Yale Review, June 2008, 51

[ii] The New Dictionary of Thoughts: A Cyclopedia of Quotations from the Best Authors of The World, Both Ancient and Modern, Alphabetically Arranged by Subject, Standard Book Company (1961), 28. The quote appears under the subject heading, “Appreciation.”

[iii] Ibid, 52

[iv] Ibid, 52

[v] Ibid, 42

[vi] Ibid, 42-43

[vii] Ibid, 43

[viii] Ibid, 43

[ix] Ibid, 43

[x] Ibid, 43

[xi] Ibid, 43-44

[xii] Ibid, 44

[xiii] Ibid, 44-45

[xiv] Ibid, 45

[xv] Ibid, 45

[xvi] Ibid, 45

[xvii] Ibid, 45-46

[xviii] Ibid, 46-47

[xix] Ibid, 47. Note that the word “attend(ed)” appears as on this page and on page 49: on the reading of poetry. I would say that the word “attend” figures prominently in Woolf’s reading processes as meaning the reader paying attention to what an author is attempting to accomplish.

[xx] Ibid, 47

[xxi] Ibid, 48

[xxii] Ibid, 48

[xxiii] Ibid, 49

[xxiv] Ibid, 49

[xxv] Ibid, 49-50

[xxvi] Ibid, 50

[xxvii] Ibid, 50-51

[xxviii] Ibid, 51

[xxix] Ibid, 52

[xxx] Ibid, 52

[xxxi] Ibid, 43

[xxxii] Ibid, 43

[xxxiii] Ibid, 45

[xxxiv] Ibid, 46-47

[xxxv] Ibid, 47, 49

[xxxvi] Ibid, 49

[xxxvii] Ibid, 51

[xxxiii] Ibid 51-52

[xxxix] Ibid, 52