Virginia Woolf began her publishing career the year her father, Leslie Stephen, died. She could never have been a writer, she said later, had he lived; his influence and example would have been too inhibiting. Yet she gravitated naturally towards the form he had specialized in, the literary essay, and spent a lifetime perfecting her own version of it. Though her earliest pieces were written mostly as practice and potboilers and to get a foot in the door, Woolf knew she had “some gift that way”.

How extensive and idiosyncratic a gift was obvious from the first collection of Woolf’s non-fiction, The Common Reader, published in 1925, and its sequel, The Common Reader: Second series (1932), both reprinted by Leonard Woolf, with a great deal else, in a four-volume Collected Essays in the 1960s. In 1986, the definitive Hogarth Press edition set out to do scholarly justice to Woolf’s achievement as “arguably the last of the great English essayists”, but it slowed to a stop after four volumes in 1994. Fifteen years later, and with Stuart N. Clarke taking over from Andrew McNeillie as editor, the appearance of Volume Five of the projected six is a welcome sign of the project’s resuscitation.

For Woolf is undoubtedly both a great essayist and supreme stylist, whose “authentic critical masterpieces”, as Rebecca West called them, emerge with conversational ease from the bookish subjects closest to her heart: the writers of the eighteenth century, the Elizabethans, the Victorians, the great novelists. Woolf was happiest when able to daydream her way round a topic. “I don’t like facts”, she remarked when required to marshal a few about London’s Docks, and she was scornful of people who overvalued them, like William Cole, who failed to note what was passing between Walpole and Mme du Deffand because he was too busy noting the cost of Parisian cabbages. Woolf’s emphasis is always on the personal and biographical: her essay on Cowper, for instance, doesn’t quote from his poetry at all, but revisits his relations with Ann Austen; her essay on Christina Rossetti brilliantly evokes Charles Cayley, the man whose proposal the poet rejected, as an example of what Rossetti herself couldn’t countenance. Her piece on Lord Chesterfield makes an imaginative leap towards Chesterfield’s son, Philip Stanhope, the baffled recipient of the famous letters: “we feel his presence in Dresden, in Berlin, in Paris, opening the letters and poring over them and looking dolefully at the thick packets which have been accumulating year after year since he was a child of seven”; “he sat down half-way up the steep stairs which lead to the glittering hall with all the mirrors. He could not do it”.

Woolf’s taste for impressionism caused less trouble than one might guess. Her introduction to a book by George Gissing prompted a nit-picking correspondence from Gissing’s son that served only to illustrate how small Woolf’s deviations were from recorded data and how irrelevant to the integrity of the piece. “I may have arranged it a little, to suit my purpose”, she wrote of an essay on Lamb’s friend George Dyer, but there was no serious distortion of facts or breach of faith.

Volume Five covers the years during which Woolf also wrote The Waves and part of Flush, and includes the whole of the second Common Reader. It is a surprise to discover, from Stuart Clarke’s excellent notes, how hard Woolf worked on these seemingly effortless pieces for the New York Herald Tribune, the Yale Review or the Nation, and how the “grind & the screw & the torture” of writing criticism neither decreased with time nor put her off. The sheer number of essays in this volume bears witness to the useful balance she found between different kinds of composition: “writing articles is like tying one’s brain up in neat brown paper parcels”, she wrote to Ethel Smyth. “O to fly free in fiction once more! – and then I shall cry, O to tie parcels once more!” The notes are full of such revealing glosses: Woolf’s wry piece on Edmund Gosse, for instance, seems like a masterpiece of bemused restraint set next to her private opinion of him as “a crafty, worldly, prim, astute little beast” whose dealings with Robbie Ross had been “cold, cautious and clammy – like the writhing of a fat worm, red, shiny, disgusting”.

Woolf rarely lit on a subject she didn’t enjoy, or couldn’t find amusement in. The new poets of the 1930s are an exception, where her essay – written in the form of an open letter to a “Young Poet” (John Lehmann, the Woolfs’ employee at the Hogarth Press) – shows her unable to overcome the difficulty she had with writing that didn’t stir her imaginatively: “I contemplate coldly, critically, and with distaste”. The limits of her own sympathy became her subject in one of the most revealing essays here, an introduction to memoirs by the Women’s Cooperative Guild, where Woolf describes her appreciation of the working woman’s plight as merely altruistic, “thin spread and moon-coloured”. Though she tried to play the “game” of thinking herself into these hard-bitten lives, Woolf had to admit defeat: “after all, the imagination is largely the child of the flesh . . . one’s hands had never wrung and scrubbed and chopped up whatever the meat may be that makes a miner’s dinner. The picture was always letting in irrelevancies”, she concluded, with devastating simplicity; “One sat in an armchair or read a book”.

Stuart Clarke has inherited the editorial style of Volumes One to Four, with their thoroughness about variora and printing of almost identical periodical and book versions of individual pieces. It means that you keep coming back, in a rather dreamlike way, to material you have read before, either here or in an earlier volume. It may be better to dip in and out of this treasure-packed book and try to forget that it is part of an ongoing scholarly project, taking one’s cue from Woolf herself:

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.

Stuart N. Clarke, editor
THE ESSAYS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
Volume Five: 1929–1932
705pp. Hogarth Press. £30.
978 0 701 20670 3

Claire Harman’s new book, Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen conquered the world, was published earlier this year. Her biography of Fanny Burney appeared in 2000.

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