The Common Reader

"Exactly because we read Woolf for her tone – her equanimity, her ability to weave together a detached and usually very severe critical judgement with a tone of ruminative engagement. That’s a tone, as much as Beerbohm’s is in another way, which seems to me particularly enviable. I think that’s true. There’s a sense in which both Woolf and Beerbohm come after the age of Victorian literary industry. They both take for granted this common pool of Dickens , [George] Eliot and Trollope – writers of huge industry, enormous achievement and vast social observation – and they both make a quiet case for the miniature, for the perfectly wrought. So there’s a kind of running commentary on Victorian fiction in both of their work. I also think, without having illusions about the nature of the societies in which they worked, that there is a strong lure of a stable and secure literary society in their work. They both feel themselves to be at home with literature, not out of place in any way. Their tone – unlike certain American essayists – does not give a sense of having an uncertain or anxious relationship to literature. One of the dirty secrets of literature, I’ve always thought, is that there are much stronger “pop” elements to great writing than we would like to admit. The Great Gatsby appeals to us, at least in part, because it’s about rich people and bootleggers in the roaring twenties. Beerbohm and Woolf appeal to us, in part, because of the worlds they live in. Chelsea and Bloomsbury in the early part of the 20th century seem to us, at least, thrillingly stable."