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# 2025-11-28 - How Should One Read A Book? by Virginia Woolf
In the first place, I want to emphasise the note of interrogation at
the end of my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself,
the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice,
indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no
advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come
to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at
liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will
not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most
important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can
be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought
on a certain day; but is /Hamlet/ a better play than /Lear/? Nobody
can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit
authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries
and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place
upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the
breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws
and conventions--there we have none.
But to enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of
course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers,
helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water
a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here
on the very spot. This, it may be, is one of the first difficulties
that faces us in a library. What is "the very spot"? There may well
seem to be nothing but a conglomeration and huddle of confusion.
Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books;
books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers,
races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the
donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across
the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into
this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure
from what we read?
It is simple enough to say that since books have classes--fiction,
biography, poetry--we should separate them and take from each what it
is right that each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what
books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and
divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry
that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of
history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish
all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable
beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his
fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and
criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the
fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind
as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible
fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring
you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep
yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find
that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something
far more definite. The thirty-two chapters of a novel--if we consider
how to read a novel first--are an attempt to make something as formed
and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than
bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing.
Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a
novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own
experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall, then,
some event that has left a distinct impression on you--how at the
corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree
shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but
also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained
in that moment.
But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that
it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must be
subdued; others emphasised; in the process you will lose, probably,
all grasp upon the emotion itself. Then turn from your blurred and
littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist--Defoe,
Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be better able to appreciate their
mastery. It is not merely that we are in the presence of a different
person--Defoe, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy--but that we are living
in a different world. Here, in /Robinson Crusoe/, we are trudging a
plain high road; one thing happens after another; the fact and the
order of the fact is enough.
But if the open air and adventure mean everything to Defoe they mean
nothing to Jane Austen. Hers is the drawing-room, and people talking,
and by the many mirrors of their talk revealing their characters. And
if, when we have accustomed ourselves to the drawing-room and its
reflections, we turn to Hardy, we are once more spun round. The moors
are round us and the stars are above our heads. The other side of the
mind is now exposed--the dark side that comes uppermost in solitude,
not the light side that shows in company. Our relations are not
towards people, but towards Nature and destiny. Yet different as
these worlds are, each is consistent with itself. The maker of each
is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and however
great a strain they may put upon us they will never confuse us, as
lesser writers so frequently do, by introducing two different kinds
of reality into the same book. Thus to go from one great novelist to
another--from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from
Scott to Meredith--is to be wrenched and uprooted; to be thrown this
way and then that. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.
You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of
great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all
that the novelist--the great artist--gives you.
But a glance at the heterogeneous company on the shelf will show you
that writers are very seldom "great artists"; far more often a book
makes no claim to be a work of art at all. These biographies and
autobiographies, for example, lives of great men, of men long dead
and forgotten, that stand cheek by jowl with the novels and poems,
are we to refuse to read them because they are not "art"? Or shall
we read them, but read them in a different way, with a different aim?
Shall we read them in the first place to satisfy that curiosity which
possesses us sometimes when in the evening we linger in front of a
house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and each
floor of the house shows us a different section of human life in
being? Then we are consumed with curiosity about the lives of these
people--the servants gossiping, the gentlemen dining, the girl
dressing for a party, the old woman at the window with her knitting.
Who are they, what are they, what are their names, their occupations,
their thoughts, and adventures?
Biographies and memoirs answer such questions, light up innumerable
such houses; they show us people going about their daily affairs,
toiling, failing, succeeding, eating, hating, loving, until they die.
And sometimes as we watch, the house fades and the iron railings
vanish and we are out at sea; we are hunting, sailing, fighting; we
are among savages and soldiers; we are taking part in great
campaigns. Or if we like to stay here in England, in London, still
the scene changes; the street narrows; the house becomes small,
cramped, diamond-paned, and malodorous. We see a poet, Donne, driven
from such a house because the walls were so thin that when the
children cried their voices cut through them. We can follow him,
through the paths that lie in the pages of books, to Twickenham; to
Lady Bedford's Park, a famous meeting-ground for nobles and poets;
and then turn our steps to Wilton, the great house under the downs,
and hear Sidney read the /Arcadia/ to his sister; and ramble among
the very marshes and see the very herons that figure in that famous
romance; and then again travel north with that other Lady Pembroke,
Anne Clifford, to her wild moors, or plunge into the city and control
our merriment at the sight of Gabriel Harvey in his black velvet suit
arguing about poetry with Spenser. Nothing is more fascinating than
to grope and stumble in the alternate darkness and splendour of
Elizabethan London. But there is no staying there. The Temples and
the Swifts, the Harleys and the St. Johns beckon us on; hour upon
hour can be spent disentangling their quarrels and deciphering their
characters; and when we tire of them we can stroll on, past a lady
in black wearing diamonds, to Samuel Johnson and Goldsmith and
Garrick; or cross the channel, if we like, and meet Voltaire and
Diderot, Madame du Deffand; and so back to England and
Twickenham--how certain places repeat themselves and certain names!--
where Lady Bedford had her Park once and Pope lived later, to
Walpole's home at Strawberry Hill. But Walpole introduces us to such
a swarm of new acquaintances, there are so many houses to visit and
bells to ring that we may well hesitate for a moment, on the Miss
Berrys' doorstep, for example, when behold, up comes Thackeray; he is
the friend of the woman whom Walpole loved; so that merely by going
from friend to friend, from garden to garden, from house to house, we
have passed from one end of English literature to another and wake to
find ourselves here again in the present, if we can so differentiate
this moment from all that have gone before. This, then, is one of the
ways in which we can read these lives and letters; we can make them
light up the many windows of the past; we can watch the famous dead
in their familiar habits and fancy sometimes that we are very close
and can surprise their secrets, and sometimes we may pull out a play
or a poem that they have written and see whether it reads differently
in the presence of the author. But this again rouses other questions.
How far, we must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer's
life--how far is it safe to let the man interpret the writer? How far
shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and antipathies that
the man himself rouses in us--so sensitive are words, so receptive of
the character of the author? These are questions that press upon us
when we read lives and letters, and we must answer them for
ourselves, for nothing can be more fatal than to be guided by the
preferences of others in a matter so personal.
But also we can read such books with another aim, not to throw light
on literature, not to become familiar with famous people, but to
refresh and exercise our own creative powers. Is there not an open
window on the right hand of the bookcase? How delightful to stop
reading and look out! How stimulating the scene is, in its
unconsciousness, its irrelevance, its perpetual movement--the colts
galloping round the field, the woman filling her pail at the well,
the donkey throwing back his head and emitting his long, acrid moan.
The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of such
fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and donkeys. Every
literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish-heap, its record of
vanished moments and forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble
accents that have perished. But if you give yourself up to the
delight of rubbish-reading you will be surprised, indeed you will be
overcome, by the relics of human life that have been cast out to
moulder. It may be one letter--but what a vision it gives! It may be
a few sentences--but what vistas they suggest! Sometimes a whole
story will come together with such beautiful humour and pathos and
completeness that it seems as if a great novelist had been at work,
yet it is only an old actor, Tate Wilkinson, remembering the strange
story of Captain Jones; it is only a young subaltern serving under
Arthur Wellesley and falling in love with a pretty girl at Lisbon; it
is only Maria Allen letting fall her sewing in the empty drawing-room
and sighing how she wishes she had taken Dr. Burney's good advice and
had never eloped with her Rishy. None of this has any value; it is
negligible in the extreme; yet how absorbing it is now and again to
go through the rubbish-heaps and find rings and scissors and broken
noses buried in the huge past and try to piece them together while
the colt gallops round the field, the woman fills her pail at the
well, and the donkey brays.
But we tire of rubbish-reading in the long run. We tire of searching
for what is needed to complete the half-truth which is all that the
Wilkinsons, the Bunburys, and the Maria Allens are able to offer us.
They had not the artist's power of mastering and eliminating; they
could not tell the whole truth even about their own lives; they have
disfigured the story that might have been so shapely. Facts are all
that they can offer us, and facts are a very inferior form of
fiction. Thus the desire grows upon us to have done with
half-statements and approximations; to cease from searching out the
minute shades of human character, to enjoy the greater abstractness,
the purer truth of fiction. Thus we create the mood, intense and
generalised, unaware of detail, but stressed by some regular,
recurrent beat, whose natural expression is poetry; and that is the
time to read poetry... when we are almost able to write it.
> Western wind, when wilt thou blow?
> The small rain down can rain.
> Christ, if my love were in my arms,
> And I in my bed again!
The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there
is no other sensation except that of the poem itself. What profound
depths we visit then--how sudden and complete is our immersion! There
is nothing here to catch hold of; nothing to stay us in our flight.
The illusion of fiction is gradual; its effects are prepared; but who
when they read these four lines stops to ask who wrote them, or
conjures up the thought of Donne's house or Sidney's secretary; or
enmeshes them in the intricacy of the past and the succession of
generations? The poet is always our contemporary. Our being for the
moment is centred and constricted, as in any violent shock of
personal emotion. Afterwards, it is true, the sensation begins to
spread in wider rings through our minds; remoter senses are reached;
these begin to sound and to comment and we are aware of echoes and
reflections. The intensity of poetry covers an immense range of
emotion. We have only to compare the force and directness of:
> I shall fall like a tree, and find my grave,
> Only remembering that I grieve,
with the wavering modulation of:
> Minutes are numbered by the fall of sands,
> As by an hour glass; the span of time
> Doth waste us to our graves, and we look on it;
> An age of pleasure, revelled out, comes home
> At last, and ends in sorrow; but the life,
> Weary of riot, numbers every sand,
> Wailing in sighs, until the last drop down,
> So to conclude calamity in rest,
or place the meditative calm of:
> whether we be young or old,
> Our destiny, our being's heart and home.
> Is with infinitude, and only there;
> With hope it is, hope that can never die,
> Effort, and expectation, and desire.
> And something evermore about to be,
beside the complete and inexhaustible loveliness of:
> The moving Moon went up the sky.
> And nowhere did abide:
> Softly she was going up,
> And a star or two beside--
or the splendid fantasy of:
> And the woodland haunter
> Shall not cease to saunter
> When, far down some glade,
> Of the great world's burning,
> One soft flame upturning
> Seems, to his discerning,
> Crocus in the shade,
to bethink us of the varied art of the poet; his power to make us at
once actors and spectators; his power to run his hand into character
as if it were a glove, and be Falstaff or Lear; his power to
condense, to widen, to state, once and for ever.
"We have only to compare"--with those words the cat is out of the
bag, and the true complexity of reading is admitted. The first
process, to receive impressions with the utmost understanding, is
only half the process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to
get the whole pleasure from a book, by another. We must pass judgment
upon these multitudinous impressions; we must make of these fleeting
shapes one that is hard and lasting. But not directly. Wait for the
dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to
die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall
asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that
Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but
differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole. And the
book as a whole is different from the book received currently in
separate phrases. Details now fit themselves into their places. We
see the shape from start to finish; it is a barn, a pigsty, or a
cathedral. Now then we can compare book with book as we compare
building with building. But this act of comparison means that our
attitude has changed; we are no longer the friends of the writer, but
his judges; and just as we cannot be too sympathetic as friends, so
as judges we cannot be too severe. Are they not criminals, books that
have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious
enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books,
faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease? Let us
then be severe in our judgments; let us compare each book with the
greatest of its kind. There they hang in the mind the shapes of the
books we have read solidified by the judgments we have passed on
them--/Robinson Crusoe, Emma, The Return of the Native/, Compare the
novels with these--even the latest and least of novels has a right to
be judged with the best. And so with poetry--when the intoxication of
rhythm has died down and the splendour of words has faded, a
visionary shape will return to us and this must be compared with
/Lear/, with /Phidre/, with /The Prelude/; or if not with these, with
whatever is the best or seems to us to be the best in its own kind.
And we may be sure that the newness of new poetry and fiction is its
most superficial quality and that we have only to alter slightly, not
to recast, the standards by which we have judged the old.
It would be foolish, then, to pretend that the second part of
reading, to judge, to compare, is as simple as the first--to open the
mind wide to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions. To
continue reading without the book before you, to hold one
shadow-shape against another, to have read widely enough and with
enough understanding to make such comparisons alive and
illuminating--that is difficult; it is still more difficult to press
further and to say, "Not only is the book of this sort, but it is of
this value; here it fails; here it succeeds; this is bad; that is
good." To carry out this part of a reader's duty needs such
imagination, insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive any
one mind sufficiently endowed; impossible for the most self-confident
to find more than the seeds of such powers in himself. Would it not
be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the
critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide
the question of the book's absolute value for us? Yet how impossible!
We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our identity
as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathise wholly or immerse
ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers,
"I hate, I love", and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely
because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and
novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person
intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments
are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks
through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we
cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. But as
time goes on perhaps we can train our taste; perhaps we can make it
submit to some control. When it has fed greedily and lavishly upon
books of all sorts--poetry, fiction, history, biography--and has
stopped reading and looked for long spaces upon the variety, the
incongruity of the living world, we shall find that it is changing a
little; it is not so greedy, it is more reflective. It will begin to
bring us not merely judgments on particular books, but it will tell
us that there is a quality common to certain books. Listen, it will
say, what shall we call /this/? And it will read us perhaps /Lear/
and then perhaps the /Agamemnon/ in order to bring out that common
quality. Thus, with our taste to guide us, we shall venture beyond
the particular book in search of qualities that group books together;
we shall give them names and thus frame a rule that brings order into
our perceptions. We shall gain a further and a rarer pleasure from
that discrimination. But as a rule only lives when it is perpetually
broken by contact with the books themselves--nothing is easier and
more stultifying than to make rules which exist out of touch with
facts, in a vacuum--now at last, in order to steady ourselves in this
difficult attempt, it may be well to turn to the very rare writers
who are able to enlighten us upon literature as an art. Coleridge and
Dryden and Johnson, in their considered criticism, the poets and
novelists themselves in their considered sayings, are often
surprisingly revelant; they light up and solidify the vague ideas
that have been tumbling in the misty depths of our minds. But they
are only able to help us if we come to them laden with questions and
suggestions won honestly in the course of our own reading. They can
do nothing for us if we herd ourselves under their authority and lie
down like sheep in the shade of a hedge. We can only understand their
ruling when it comes in conflict with our own and vanquishes it.
If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the
rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and Judgment, you may
perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is
unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to
make any valuable coiitribution to its criticism. We must remain
readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those
rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our
responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we
raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of
the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is
created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into
print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and
individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is
necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the
procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only
one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be
pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor
fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful
cow grazing in a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the
press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the
opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and
unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great
severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by
our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied,
that would be an end worth reaching.
Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not
some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves,
and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have
sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and
the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their
rewards--their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly
upon imperishable marble--the Almighty will turn to Peter and will
say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books
under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give
them here. They have loved reading."
(HTM) Collected Essays Volume 2 by Virginia Woolf, PDF p.9-19
See below for an ealier version of this article by the same author.
(TXT) How Should One Read A Book? By Virginia Woolf
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