Virginia Woolf's Reading Notebooks

Abstract

and social critic.Equally impressive is her breadth: Woolf ranged freely through genres, periods, and countries, glancing at some only once or twice and returning, fascinated, to others.Notes on fiction, poetry, and drama jostle each other on her pages, intermingling with notes on history, biography, journals, criticism, science, anthropology, and newspaper reports of contemporary events.Some of the earliest entries translate and comment on Greek and Latin literature, and she continued to read Greek, both in the original and in English and French translations, throughout her life.She read French literature and criticism in the original, Dante in a bilingual edition, Russian fiction in translation.English literature and history she read from beginning to end, constantly reaching for familiar works and excitedly discovering new ones.At the end of her life, Woolf decided to translate her wide reading into her own history of English literature.Provisionally called Reading at Random or Turning the Page, her "Common History book" was going to capture those aspects of the creative act and its continuity ignored by traditional texts. 3"Did I tell you I'm reading the whole of English literature through?"she wrote to Ethel Smyth on February 1, 1941, during the war and only two months before her death."Thank God, as you would say, one's fathers left one a taste for reading!Instead of thinking, by May we shall be-whatever it may be: I think, only 3 months to read Ben Jonson, Milton, Donne, & all the rest!" (L, VI, 3685).*In order to understand Woolf's complex response to her legacy, it is necessary to look first at the environment that nourished it.Unlike Kitty Malone, daughter of an Oxford don in The Pargiters, whose bookcase in 1880 contained only works read in childhood, a prayer book and a Bible, two copies of Sesame and Lilies, and three bound volumes on law and duty-and to whom most of English literature was forbidden because it was not "fit reading for a girl"-Woolf was allowed the freedom of her father's library, a freedom rare in those days, and she took advantage of it. 5Both her early experiences of literature and her later critical writing attest to her strong sense of a literary tradition that, she felt, she made her own through the act of reading.In the essay called "Reading" (1919), she describes how a young reader sitting in the library of an English country house brings to life a long line of poets stretching from Keats back to "some uncouth poet scarcely able to syllable his words" (CE, II, 13).Later, in her essay on The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1932), Woolf, speaking now as a mature reader/critic, confidently adds her name and her perceptions of the book to "the long succession of readers" dating back to 1655 be- TurgenevRudin On the Eve 12 th Night. 1 p., on cover.

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