{"id":172907,"date":"2026-02-18T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T15:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=172907"},"modified":"2026-02-17T14:59:55","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T19:59:55","slug":"reading-at-random-with-virginia-woolf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/02\/18\/reading-at-random-with-virginia-woolf\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading at Random with Virginia Woolf"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Georg-Johann, random pixels, colored by Polyominoe, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC0 1.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cLet us try then to recapture some actual experience, which seems to have a connection with the experience of reading these old books; to spring from poetry; to be interfused with the same emotion,\u201d Virginia Woolf writes in one of many fragmentary drafts of her final book, a history of English literature whose working titles included \u201cReading at Random.\u201d It was to be nothing less than her own philosophy of reading. More than mere absorption of the written word, reading, for Woolf, was an active expression of the mind and a mode of \u201cactual experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time of her death in March 1941, Woolf had begun work on only two chapters of the book, titled \u201cAnon\u201d and \u201cThe Reader.\u201d The New York Public Library\u2019s Berg Collection holds the full archive of \u201cReading at Random,\u201d including multiple manuscript and typescript drafts of each chapter, as well as Woolf\u2019s initial reading notes. The project is little-known and hardly legible, composed as it is of disintegrating notebooks and unbound pages, the letters jumbled, the margins mottled with penciled and penned notes, the versos soiled, the edges crinkled, the handwriting spidery. To make any sense of the matter, the reader must squint her eyes and relax her mind and allow the words to occasionally, here and there, flower into meaning.<\/p>\n

\u201cReading at Random\u201d begins with a voice. It is the voice of Anon, the anonymous bard at the back door of the aristocratic great house, whom Woolf imagines as the origin point of the English literary project.\u00a0While the phrase literary history<\/em> suggests a straightforward chronology, Woolf suggests that its beginnings were disorganized, deviant; Anon\u2019s was \u201ca voice that stumbles, that repeats, that loses the thread of its argument \u2026\u201d It was also a voice that sometimes included a broader audience, or riffed on one. \u201cHe was a simple singer,\u201d Woolf writes of Anon, \u201clifting a song or a story from other people\u2019s lips, and letting the audience join in the chorus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across the text\u2019s two extant chapters, Woolf traces the development of English literature through the lens of its consumers. At first an itinerant singer living on the fringes of society, Anon gains renown with the advent of the Elizabethan playhouse and its raucous audience, followed by the growing primacy of the printing press, which in turn births the single, solitary figure of the reader. This is the story of a collective experience whittled down to an individual consciousness\u2014her own. Woolf\u2019s underlying quest is to discover how we can again connect reading to the book\u2019s \u00a0primeval, communal, and experiential origins: how to travel \u201cthe roads now faded in the mind,\u201d uncover \u201cthe source of the sunk impulse \u2026 the hidden spring, the gush of water deep beneath the mud,\u201d tunnel our way back to what she calls \u201cthe song beneath\u201d the book.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

On October 17, 1940, Woolf recorded her new book idea in her diary, describing her plan to \u201ctransfer my habitual note taking I think\u2014what I do on odd days\u2014to random reading.\u201d A methodology of disorder was at the heart of this project. \u201cRandom\u201d-ness comes to stand in for an entire state of mind, the space of imagination that exists between reader and book. \u201cRead very widely,\u201d she instructs herself in an outline, but \u201cwrite rather from memory.\u201d In the book\u2019s second chapter, \u201cThe Reader,\u201d she observes that \u201cit is equally important, to the understanding of the poem, not to read at all.\u201d Why? What is the power of this empty space, this absence of mind, this not-reading that reading provokes in us?<\/p>\n

For Woolf, what a reader attains by not reading is \u201cthat state of mind in which it seems possible to us to write the book, not to read it.\u201d This unexpected porousness between reader and writer is our inheritance from the literary traditions of the premodern world, for \u201cit is still the anonymous voice speaking anonymously generally that the listener already half knows, or half remembers. The listener hears the voice partly in himself,\u201d as Woolf writes in a typescript fragment of \u201cAnon.\u201d Not-reading reproduces in the reader the collaborative effect that anonymous authorship once had on an audience, or on a listener.<\/p>\n

\u201cHalf knows, or half remembers.\u201d Foreknowledge and memory: an intuitive recognition that reaches in both directions at once, toward the future and toward the past. There is a ghostly quality to this always-already state of the relationship between reader and writer. In A Room of One\u2019s Own<\/em>, Woolf speculates:<\/p>\n

Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rapture, for Woolf, is recognition. Recognition relies on something that already exists, and this is Woolf\u2019s ideal of writing: it calls forth what already exists, but is not yet known, in the reader. You might call this a kind of emotional knowledge; you might call it the unconscious, a submerged level of sense that the conscious mind can register only as \u201crandom\u201d-ness. It is worth noting here that Woolf\u2019s Hogarth Press was Freud\u2019s publisher in English, and she was reading his work around the time she drafted \u201cReading at Random.\u201d One penciled margin note on a typescript passage of \u201cAnon\u201d conjures Woolf\u2019s idea of reading as a recognitive process: \u201cIt brought to the surface the old hidden world.\u201d<\/p>\n

In To the Lighthouse <\/em>(1927), Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sit together reading in the library after dinner. Each longs to communicate with the other, but neither can find the right words. Taking up a volume of poems, Mrs. Ramsay \u201cbegan reading here and there at random.\u201d The words resonate and echo in her mind, seamlessly interweaving with her thoughts, lulling her \u201clike a person in a light sleep.\u201d The book, though Woolf does not say so outright, is a collection of Shakespeare\u2019s sonnets; and it can be no coincidence that Shakespeare, for Woolf, is the quintessence of anonymity in writing. In her \u201cReading at Random\u201d notes, she writes, \u201cAbout Shre: the person is consumed: Sre never breaks the envelope. We dont want to know about him: Completely expressed. When the incantation ceases, we see the person.\u201d Who is \u201cthe person,\u201d exactly\u2014Shakespeare or his reader? For as long as the incantation lasts, both are \u201cconsumed\u201d together.<\/p>\n

When the Ramsays lay their books aside and begin, finally, to talk, the quality of their togetherness has changed. Though Mr. Ramsay is still \u201cthinking of Scott\u2019s novels and Balzac\u2019s novels,\u201d Woolf writes, they are now \u201cdrawing together, involuntarily,\u201d and Mrs. Ramsay can \u201cfeel his mind like a raised hand shadowing her mind.\u201d Mr. Ramsay badly wants his wife to tell him that she loves him, but Mrs. Ramsay confronts a check, an insurmountable obstacle, for \u201cshe never could say what she felt.\u201d But as the scene ends, they are looking at each other and Mrs. Ramsay is smiling. She has not said that she loves Mr. Ramsay. And yet in her mind \u201cshe had triumphed again. She had not said it: yet he knew.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mrs. Ramsay\u2019s triumph, and Virginia Woolf\u2019s ideal, is communication without need of language. This would seem, on the face of things, to be precisely the opposite of reading or writing; and yet the moment of silent communion is enabled only by the long scene of reading that precedes it, just as reading is a precursor to that moment of recognition, that state of mind in which one can shut the book, having absorbed its voice as though it were one\u2019s own. The reader-writer relationship models this possibility of shared consciousness.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In her unfinished memoir \u201cA Sketch of the Past,\u201d written contemporaneously with \u201cReading at Random,\u201d Woolf describes a formative moment from childhood in which for the first time she understood a poem she was reading. \u201cI had a feeling of transparency in words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them; to foretell them as if they had developed what one is already feeling,\u201d she writes. Whereas the fictional Ramsays connect with each other through this very sensation, when the young Woolf of \u201cA Sketch\u201d tries to explain her feeling about the poem to her sister, Vanessa Bell, she fails to make herself clear. \u201cI suppose Nessa has forgotten; no one could have understood from what I said the queer feeling I had in the hot grass, that poetry was coming true.\u201d The sensation must remain Woolf\u2019s own, and yet not her own, for it is <\/em>shared\u2014if not with Vanessa, then with the (anonymous) poet, and now also with Woolf\u2019s own reader. We understand her exactly, for this \u201cqueer feeling\u201d has been felt by readers always (Emily Dickinson: \u201cIf I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?\u201d).<\/p>\n

James Wood wrote that Woolf\u2019s \u201cgreatest fiction is moved by the faith that to have visions is to see beyond aesthetic vision.\u201d It\u2019s a cunning take on the last line of To the Lighthouse<\/em>, in which Lily Briscoe completes her post-Impressionist portrait of Mrs. Ramsay (\u201cYes, she thought \u2026 I have had my vision\u201d). Wood implies that the novel itself, like Lily\u2019s painting, is but a transitional object to reach for some greater truth. Though Woolf was a fervent atheist, her drafts for \u201cReading at Random\u201d do theorize the English literary tradition as a quasidivine medium\u2014an intercessor of sorts\u2014between alienated modern man and what she likes to call reality. \u201cIf I could catch the feeling, I would,\u201d Woolf wrote in a 1929 diary entry cited by Wood; \u201cthe feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.\u201d The true language of reality is not writing, for writing is but a fragmentary grasping, a failed attempt to \u201ccatch the feeling.\u201d It is singing. The \u201cold hidden world\u201d of Anon is a historicized version of Woolf\u2019s longed-for \u201creal world,\u201d in which thought and expression are continuous, and life and literature are one.<\/p>\n

There is a photograph I love of Virginia Woolf\u2019s parents in the library at Talland House, the family\u2019s beloved summer home in Cornwall. On a small sofa, which is angled away from the camera, Leslie and Julia Stephen sit pressed against each other, reading. Though they are reading separate books, they seem somehow unified in their closeness and their attention, so absorbed as to appear unaware of whoever the photographer might have been. One cannot help but think of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay with his Scott and her Shakespeare. But here there is a difference, an additional presence: Virginia herself as a young girl, sitting behind the sofa, half-obscured by her father\u2019s figure. Only her head is visible, cutting straight across her parents\u2019 diagonal line. She is looking right at us, her chin propped in her hand. The photograph gives the viewer the sense of occupying two scenes at once: the moment of intimacy between the Stephens, and that moment as it is captured by the young Woolf\u2019s gaze. Her not-reading gives their reading meaning\u2014though, of course, I am projecting the future onto the past. She is only eleven; she has not yet written a masterpiece. All the same, one feels that the novel is there in her eyes already. She is making poetry come true.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Virginia Woolf’s parents, Julia and Leslie Stephen. From the Leslie Stephen photograph album in the Mortimer Rare Book Collection at Smith College Library, Special Collections.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Frances Lindemann is a writer and educator. Her work has appeared in <\/em>The Drift and\u00a0<\/em>The Times Literary Supplement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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