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Woolf Salon #32: Common Reader at 100 on Dec. 5

Posted in events, tagged , on Tuesday 2 December 2025| Leave a Comment »

The upcoming Woolf Salon on Friday, Dec. 5, will celebrate The Common Reader at 100, Virginia’s book-length work of literary criticism collecting 20 essays which she introduces with a short preface. You can log in via Zoom.

The first salon in July 2020 invited attendees to “imagine a Woolfian criticism.” More than five years later, the salon returns to Woolf’s critical essays and to questions about the difference Woolf’s reading and thinking—and her thinking about reading—might make for us here and now.

  • Why might the concept “common reader” be of urgent concern in our Present Day?
  • As you return to the essays gathered in the 1925 volume, what comes to mind?
  • What do you notice about Woolf’s approach to literature as “common ground”?
  • Does anything prompt you to wonder about your own reading practices? Your own framework(s) of criticism?
  • What confuses you? What activates you? What in these pages do you relish?

Details

Hosts: Salon Conspirators
What: Woolf Salon #32: The Common Reader at 100
Date: Friday, Dec. 5
Time: 2 p.m. EST (New York) / 1 p.m. CST (Chicago) / noon MST (Albuquerque) / noon CST (México City) / 11 a.m. PST (Los Angeles) / 4 p.m. (Rio de Janeiro) / 7 p.m. GMT (London) / 8 p.m. CET (Paris) / 9 p.m. EET (Tallinn); 10 p.m. (Istanbul; Moscow) / 4 a.m. JST Sat 12/6 (Tokyo) / 6 a.m. AEDT Sat 12/6 (Sydney)
Homework: “Modern Fiction,” which you can read here. Also, please bring a passage from or a question about another Common Reader essay.
How to participate: Anyone can join the group. Just contact woolfsalonproject@gmail.com to sign up for the email list and receive the Zoom link.

Background on the Salon

The Salon Conspirators — Ben Hagen, Shilo McGiff, Amy Smith, and Drew Shannon — began the Woolf Salon Project in July 2020 to provide opportunities for conversation and conviviality among Woolf-interested scholars, students, and common readers during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Virginia Woolf on The Common Reader, 100 years ago today

Posted in diaries, essays, quotes, tagged , , , on Tuesday 5 September 2023| Leave a Comment »

The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf’s book of essays published in 1925 with a jacket design by her sister Vanessa Bell, was provisionally titled Reading.

In it, she planned to revise some of her previously published essays and add some new ones, according to Mark Hussey in Virginia Woolf A to Z. Among its most important essays are “On Not Knowing Greek,” “Modern Fiction,” and “How It Strikes a Contemporary.”

One hundred years ago today, in her Sept. 5, 1923, diary entry, Woolf fills the half hour before dinner with her thoughts about beginning to write her book of collected essays:

A cold douche should be taken (& generally is) before beginning a book. It invigorates; makes one say “Oh all right. I write to please myself,” & so go ahead. It also has the effect of making me more definite & outspoken in my style, which I imagine all to the good. At any rate, I began for the 5th but last time, I swear, what is now to be called The Common Reader; & did the first page quite moderately well this morning. After all this stew, its odd how, as soon as I begin, a new aspect, never all this 2 or 3 years thought of, at once becomes clear; & gives the whole bundle a new proportion. To curtail, I shall really investigate literature with a view to answering certain questions about ourselves–Characters are to be merely views: personality must be avoided at all costs. I’m sure my Conrad adventure taught me this. Directly you specify hair, age, &tc something frivolous, or irrelevant, gents the book –Dinner! – Diary 2, 265.

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