Virginia Woolf's Background

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 97, 2 May 1941, Page 5

Virginia Woolf's Background

\/IRGINIA WOOLF wrote a book-two volumes in . fact-called The Common Reader. You and I, coming across this on a library shelf, might think The Common Reader — that sounds like me. I'll take a look at this and see if I can get any ideas from it. And we find that the first essay is entitled The Pastons and Chaucer. I suppose all of us "common readers" have heard of Chaucer, and know that he wrote the Canterbury Tales, and perhaps we've even read a little. But how many of us know anything of the Paston Letters, a series of domestic letters written in the fifteenth century? You will find other essays about Jane Austen, and George Eliot and Thomas Hardy and other familiar names, But Virginia Woolf also treats her " common reader " to disquisitions on Montaigne, and the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, and Montaigne and the Duchess of Newcastle, and John Evelyn and other literary personalities that don’t form the daily fare of what we would call the common reader, The truth is that Virginia Woolf spent her life among readers far above the common, and what was "common" to her seems extremely elevated to us. "Daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen," said the recent cable announcing her death "and related to half a dozen famous literary families . , ."-to the Darwins, including Charles Darwin who set the world by the ears when he published The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, to the Symondses, John Addington Symonds and the rest, to the Stracheys, the St. Loe Stracheys and Lytton Strachey whose entertaining and occa-

sionally irreverent life of Queen Victoria is known to many of you, as well as his Eminent Victorians. There was plenty of brilliance within the family itself, and when we see gathered round thése the scholarly friends who delighted to visit the Stephens’s household, the brilliance becomes perfectly dazzling, Virginia Woolf, we are told, was educated at home. When one lives in a home like that, why go away to be educated? Merely being there, surrounded by books and good music and the talk of intellectual people, is surely a complete education.-(" Women Novelists: Virginia Woolf,’ by Margaret Johnston, 2YA, April 19.)