25 pages • 50 minutes read
How Should One Read a Book?
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Themes
Finding Pleasure in Art
A recurring theme in this essay is the pursuit of pleasure in consuming art. Woolf explores several answers to the nominal question of the essay, “How Should One Read a Book?” but in the end circles back to a word she uses early on: pleasure. In the second paragraph, she asks two questions: “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?” (2). She asks the first question under the assumption that pleasure is the goal but then rescinds this assumption by asking the second question, suggesting that the essay will explore the reasons for seeking pleasure when reading.
In order to explore this theme, Woolf uses metaphors, drawing comparisons between reading and other forms of consumption. Early on, she compares her desire to read with a hunger for food: “My appetite is so fitful and so capricious” (2). The pleasures of reading, then, reflect the satisfaction of being full. Continuing the metaphor, she advises that sometimes the most challenging reads can “yield the richest fruits,” and even if one is not initially drawn to them at first, they may become “appetizing and essential” later (9). As she weaves in and out of how one should consume literature, she uses alludes to all kinds of other pleasures. In these comparisons, she hints at her ultimate advice, which is to follow one’s own tastes in deciding what and how to read.
After exploring authors’ styles, readers’ appetites, and the art of judgment, in her final paragraph Woolf returns to that word she mentioned earlier. Even more, she states that “it is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading” (18). Even though narrative style and thoughtful criticism took up the majority of space in her essay, Woolf believes that pleasure is by far the most important aspect of the experience of reading. Furthermore, while the pleasure is complex, indefinable, and “useless,” Woolf says that it “is enough.” One needs no more than a glimpse of this feeling to learn to love reading. In the end, the importance of this pleasure cannot be overstated. She argues that it is the pleasure of reading that drives humanity forward in every way, in art and technology and lifestyle. While Woolf establishes herself as an intellectual, she orients herself towards the simpler, more worldly feeling of pleasure.
The Critical Freedom of the Individual
In exploring the meaning of reading and writing, Virginia Woolf often lands on the idea of individual freedom. Related to her interests in gender equality, Woolf conveys the belief that every person has their own right to read, interpret, judge, and write without deferring to literary authorities or critics. This idea is introduced early on when she notes that, “[h]ere in this room, if nowhere else, we breathe the air of freedom. Here simple and learned, man and woman are alike” (1). She emphasizes the fact that she will not lay down laws about how one should read a book, that first and foremost one should read a book with freedom. This outlook breaks down hierarchical structures associated at the time with institutionalized education and intellectual merit.
Woolf goes on to suggest that critical freedom means that there should not be a hierarchy placing author above reader or vice versa, either. Woolf notes that “one cannot write the most ordinary little story […] without coming up against difficulties that the greatest of novelists have had to face” (5). Woolf reveals her belief that there is not some grand difference between those who write incredible novels and those who read them. Anyone who writes, she says, will encounter the same problems as everyone who writes. She goes on to analyze, with great respect, the unique styles of three different authors. All are vastly different, all are distasteful to some readers and appetizing to others. It is the right of the individual, then, to decide their own tastes.
Woolf then moves on to a reader’s right to judge a work. She touches on critics and their potential uses, but she warns the reader not to rely on them. She notes: “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” (15). Here, she asks the reader to decide their judgments for themselves. Woolf argues that this process, an inherently internal one, is how one gets the most value out of reading.
Art as a Reflection of the Natural World
Virginia Woolf draws comparisons between art and the natural world. Her comparisons emphasize the significance of reading. Immediately, she invites the reader to imagine a scene in which they are sitting in a reading room with “the trees rustling, the gardener talking, the donkey braying, the old women gossiping at the pump—and all the ordinary processes of life pursuing the casual irregular way which they have pursued these many hundreds of years” (1). She goes on to say that, “[a]s casually, as persistently, books have been coming together on the shelves” (1). In the same way that trees rustle, books are written and collected. This suggests that the significance placed on reading is justified by the fact that it is as natural to human nature as the movement of trees in the natural world.
Woolf goes on to compare the different genres to different species of animals. She explains that expecting the same experience reading a poem as a novel is to expect the same from a tiger and a tortoise. Variation in books, then, is as important as variation in animal species. Implied in this comparison is that they are all part of the world’s ecosystem. Without other genres, any one genre would hold less meaning. It is the differences themselves that define a work for what it is.
Woolf continues this comparison, adding complexity to the world of books that mirrors that of the natural world. Like animals, she writes, books “are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves” (4). In the way that species evolve accidentally, so does literature. This reflects the project of modernism itself; modernist writers generally pursued novelty and pushed literature “boundaries” to express the conditions of modernity, often alongside allusions to literature of the past–the “unexpected matches.” Over time, as she notes in the first paragraph, the literary canon evolves the same way that the natural world does.
In the final paragraph, Woolf broadly argues that the reason that humans have come so far evolutionarily is the fact that humans love stories. The pleasure of reading is “so immensely fertilizing” to the mind that it has forced people out of caves, around fires, into cities, among one another (18). Here, she argues that love of reading is not only as natural as any other human emotion but in fact the reason for so many others.
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By Virginia Woolf
