Montaigreene, or, You Essay Today
Montaigreene, or, You Essai Today
Thomas Karshan in the TLS for March 22, 2013, reviewing Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, editors, Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, and Randi Salomon, Virginia Woolf's Essayism:
Woolf's own essays, with their clouds of subjectivity, would seem resolutely Montaignean, not Baconian. She writes on classic Montaignean subjects such as sickness, wandering, the blind hunger of Empire, the will-o'-the-wisp of the self; she insists that the "proper use" of the essay is "to express one's personal peculiarities"; and in "Modern Essays" she reports enthusiastically on the rebirth, with Max Beerbohm, of the essayistic "I", lost since the glory days of Lamb and Hunt. But it is noticeable how much more comfortable she is writing "we" or "one" than "I", and sheltering her thoughts under those more impersonal pronouns' broader canopies. Even her essay "Street-Haunting", about the pleasures of losing oneself on winter dusks amid London streets, speaks with a companionability that draws us in and expels all fear of loneliness, and is built in neoclassical proportions, its eighteen paragraphs arching up from and back to the room of one's own. "Never to be yourself and yet always - that is the problem", she writes in "The Modern Essay"; and though she seeks out the pleasures of self-loss, she protects herself by holding on, like a lucky charm, to the manners of Addison and Macaulay.
Thomas Karshan in the TLS for March 22, 2013, reviewing Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, editors, Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, and Randi Salomon, Virginia Woolf's Essayism:
Woolf's own essays, with their clouds of subjectivity, would seem resolutely Montaignean, not Baconian. She writes on classic Montaignean subjects such as sickness, wandering, the blind hunger of Empire, the will-o'-the-wisp of the self; she insists that the "proper use" of the essay is "to express one's personal peculiarities"; and in "Modern Essays" she reports enthusiastically on the rebirth, with Max Beerbohm, of the essayistic "I", lost since the glory days of Lamb and Hunt. But it is noticeable how much more comfortable she is writing "we" or "one" than "I", and sheltering her thoughts under those more impersonal pronouns' broader canopies. Even her essay "Street-Haunting", about the pleasures of losing oneself on winter dusks amid London streets, speaks with a companionability that draws us in and expels all fear of loneliness, and is built in neoclassical proportions, its eighteen paragraphs arching up from and back to the room of one's own. "Never to be yourself and yet always - that is the problem", she writes in "The Modern Essay"; and though she seeks out the pleasures of self-loss, she protects herself by holding on, like a lucky charm, to the manners of Addison and Macaulay.
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