How Should One Read a Book? E-Book

Virginia Woolf

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 36

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

'I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement 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."' First delivered as a speech to schoolgirls in Kent in 1926, this enchanting short essay by the towering Modernist writer Virginia Woolf celebrates the importance of the written word. With a measured but ardent tone, Woolf weaves together thought and quote, verse and prose into a moving tract on the power literature can have over its reader, in a way which still resounds with truth today.

Leseprobe

How Should One Read a Book?

virginia woolf

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How Should One Read a Book? first published in 1925This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2021

Edited text © Renard Press Ltd, 2021Biographical Note © Renard Press Ltd, 2021

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Extra Material edited by Tom Conaghan

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contents

How Should One Read a Book?

Notes

A Biographical Note onVirginia Woolf

In the Same Series

how should one read a book?1

1 This essay is based on a paper read at a school (woolf’s note). The speech was given at Hayes Court Common school in Kent on the 30th of January, 1926; it was then published in The Yale Review later that year, and adapted and republished in the Second Common Reader in 1932.

In the first place, i want toemphasise 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