492
PARTISAN REVIEW
sion, the reality of the fictional world, the vividness of life ex–
pressed in letters, landscape, emotions in poetry, contemporary
writers, the Russians, the past, the Victorians, the question of bad
writing, the War, the Elizabethans. But what gives all these es–
says their special and distinctive quality is that they were written
by an active
reader,
someone who read with pencil in hand,
whose working model of the literary life was not of a series of
isolated triumphs or assaults, but of a continuing exchange; she
read in order to respond and be responded to, not merely to absorb
the imagination of another. She read to write, as it were . This
gave a direction to her reading, an economy to her responses,
and it implied that others would be reading
her
in the same
fashion-attentively, seriously, and expectantly. The daughter of
Leslie Stephen clearly kept up a kind of subtle argument with the
ideas and positions expressed in his
Hours in a Library,
but his was
not the only authoritative voice she heard. Established
reputations and accepted canons exerted their power; she knew
the obsessive English need to rank all writers against one another
and also against the writers of the past. So, casting her
observations in those terms, she would take advantage of that
framework to question the guardians of literary merit. She
might solemnly address "those who have so far solved the
difficulties of [Meredith] that they wish to make up their minds
as to his final position in English literature." Or, confronting
some of the venerated classics of the canon, she would suggest
that it might be "wholesome to make sure that they still earn
their pedestals and do not merely cast their shadows over heads
bent superstitiously from custom." The reader may be reminded
here and elsewhere that Woolf would never escape altogether
from the obsession with ranking that permeated the
Dictionary of
National Biography,
the major work of her father ' s lifetime, which
surrounded her childhood.
In our own context, Woolfs essays may seem quite un–
polemical. They do not "promote" writers or points of view, even
those obviously cherished by the writer, nor do they advance
specific social and political positions, despite their obviously per–
sonal tone and approach. Instead of such explicit warfare against
tendencies or trends, the reader finds interesting distinctions
which can be taken on to the next essay, or set against other ob–
servations, or introduced into a related argument in another es-
