Reading for oneself
Use The Common Reader and Modern Fiction to practise a free, attentive way of reading that forms its own judgments.
An original introduction. This guide accompanies the work; it is neither the complete text nor a translation.
Situating the text
Published in 1925, the same spring as Mrs Dalloway, it gathers and revises pieces first written for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals; a second series followed in 1932. Its essay Modern Fiction, first written in 1919, criticizes the ‘materialist’ novel of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. This first collection of essays takes its title from Samuel Johnson: the common reader reads for pleasure rather than to instruct others or correct their opinions. Woolf moves from the Paston letters, Greek tragedy and Montaigne to Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Russian novelists and contemporary fiction, building judgments from attentive reading.
Following the arguments
A reader, not a critic : Woolf values a reader who is less learned than the critic or the scholar but builds, from scraps and impressions, a whole picture of a writer or an age. Life as a luminous halo : Modern Fiction asks novelists to leave conventional plots behind and record an ordinary mind on an ordinary day, as impressions fall like atoms. Lives of the obscure : Several essays recover forgotten letter writers, diarists and women such as Margaret Cavendish and Laetitia Pilkington, testing how literary history decides who is remembered.
Continuing the reading
Begin with the short title essay and Modern Fiction, then read On Not Knowing Greek or Montaigne to see how Woolf reads authors separated from her by language and time. Published in 1925, the same spring as Mrs Dalloway, it gathers and revises pieces first written for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals; a second series followed in 1932. Its essay Modern Fiction, first written in 1919, criticizes the ‘materialist’ novel of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy.
A reader’s judgment grows from attention, comparison and pleasure rather than from received rules.
Your turn to think.
- What distinguishes the common reader from the critic and the scholar in the title essay?
- Which conventions of the novel does Modern Fiction reject, and what does it propose in their place?
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