1In Virginia Woolf’s fiction, history is nearly always mediated through a character’s consciousness and actions: someone opens a book, Orlando’s biographer intervenes, or, in the case of Between the Acts, Miss La Trobe stages a pageant. The latter event, during which the villagers don costumes to re-enact a heavy-handed and at times amusingly clumsy, presentation of English history, illustrates how the past cannot be abstracted from its relation to the present. As Mrs Swithin muses during the play, thinking of the Victorians: ‘“I don’t believe” she said with her odd little smile, “that there ever were such people. Only you and me and William dressed differently”’ (Woolf 1941, 156). The paradox in her assertion points to the impossibility of imagining the past as anything but the present ‘dressed differently’, since any re-creation of it can only be achieved through such costumes, be they material or discursive. Consequently, history is often called upon as a form of metaphor, a way to both illustrate and stylise personal experience. In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa reads history books alone in her room, and Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow becomes entwined with her own thoughts about her failed marriage: ‘She had read late at night of the retreat from Moscow. . . . Richard insisted, after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed. . . . she had failed him. And then at Constantinople, and again and again.’ (Woolf 1925b, 27). The parallel between the failures of Napoleon and her own highlights how deeply personal her evocation of the past is, all the more so as the Frenchman is not often an object of sympathy in England. Instead of following the nationalistic version of events, of a tyrant rightly defeated, she empathises with the enemy’s failure and uses his story a way to think back to her own traumas.
- 1 The complexity of the notion of ‘modernist historiography’, torn between positivistic academic tren (...)
2This mode of relation towards the past, insisting on how events are taken up and persist through the lives of the characters, ties in with what Lyndall Gordon has called the Woolfian ‘counter-history’, her ‘critique of what history and newspapers accustom us to define as memorable’ (Gordon 161). As Anne Besnault has shown in Virginia Woolf’s Unwritten Histories, such revisionism is the result of a complex, dialogic relation with her own historical culture. In particular, she owes a lot to a re-reading of romantic historiography, of Macauley and Carlyle in particular, which leads her to articulate the question of the ‘readability’of the past. Besnault argues ‘that far from anticipating a form of post-structural history whereby the past is only a subjective discursive construction, she enables the reader to relive an experience’ (Besnault 2022, 51). However, this reappraisal of romanticism, which has been used to oppose her vision of history to those of her contemporaries, especially T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, is far from backward-looking, and in many ways, echoes or even anticipates important trends in twentieth-century historiography.1 To illustrate this point, I wish to propose a parallel between her reflexions and the revision of romantic historiography that Hans Georg Gadamer expounds in Truth and Method. Indeed, Gadamer concludes on the fact that there is no constituted, complete object for ‘historical science’ to bear upon (Gadamer 122). Instead, history is always entwined with the ‘historical mobility of the subject’ (Gadamer 124). This is the major thesis upon which his notion of the ‘consciousness of efficient history’ is predicated (Gadamer 186). I would like to argue that following this parallel produces very interesting insights into Woolf’s vision of history as a practice centred around interpretation. Indeed, to use the words of Anne Fernald, Woolf sought ‘to challenge the hegemony of the Oxbridge education with its patriarchal canon not by overthrowing it but by revolutionizing the way we read’ (Fernald 15). She fought the canons of traditional, patriarchal history, by insisting on the concrete parameters from which it had emerged, and countering its narratives with other readings, other interpretations of the same events—such as Clarissa sympathising with Napoleon and appropriating his tragedy to express her own.
3More broadly, I would like to show that Woolf’s vision of history cannot be dissociated from her conceptions of reading, and to demonstrate how reader theories can shed light on her understanding of the historian’s work. It seems to me that this link is particularly visible in her reflections on past cultures and literature throughout the two volumes of The Common Reader. Centring on these essays, I will first try to characterise Woolf’s vision of historical discourse, by emphasising the role that she ascribes to reading. This will enable me to show that Woolf regards both reading and writing history as forms of praxis, that is to say that they involve interactions, in which the past and present, the event and its interpretation, are actively implicated. And through the description of this interaction, I will delineate the figure of a ‘Common Historian’: a historian in the mode of the Common Reader, who relates to history not by bowing to an external scholarly consensus, but by answering the call of the past autonomously, through a personal, creative and ever-renewed response.
4An important number of the essays in the two collections that make up The Common Reader deal with authors from the past, both canonical writers in the literary tradition and more obscure figures—notably women. In both cases, Woolf tends to depict the world around these texts and authors, re-creating a certain image of the past, not as a neutral sum of facts, but as a complex web of material traces, stories and human experiences, sometimes puzzling but more often deeply relatable. She intertwines past and present in a deliberately playful way, stressing the fact that the imagination is at work in any reconstruction, and that interpretations leave room for other possibilities, creating an ever-evolving, multi-faceted narrative.
5The first essay in the Common Reader, ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’, starts with such a complex interweaving. It depicts the abandoned ‘tower of Caister Castle’, with ‘jackdaws nest[ing]’ in its structure (Woolf 1925a, 4–5). Already, the monument, the trace of the past, is contaminated by present life: jackdaws have found a new use for these old stones. This present, natural life stands in sharp contrast with a spectral absence: ‘the seven religious men’ and ‘seven poor folks’ who should be praying for the souls of Sir John and his forebears, are nowhere to be seen. Not only are the men of the past not there, but the words that they should be speaking out, guaranteeing the immortality of the Pastons, have given way to silence. And with this loss comes confusion, ambivalence: ‘Antiquaries speculate and differ’ (Woolf 1925a, 5). As Patricia Ondek Laurence remarks in The Reading of Silence, ‘[i]n narrating silence, Woolf implicates the readers of her novels in new ways by creating a space for them to interpret. Since silence has no one meaning, the ambiguities of language and life are revealed’ (Laurence 12). This is particularly true in the case of the historical past: silence in Caister castle creates a sort of negative space of the kind defined by Laurence, which speculations—the antiquaries’, and possibly our own—have to fill.
6Furthermore, Woolf extends this negativity to language itself, through the notion of strangeness. In ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, she presents the paradox of a silent language: the knowledge of Ancient Greek is steeped in muteness, as nobody in the present day could speak it out: ‘it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys’ (Woolf 1925a, 23). The pride of the Oxford don is surely the target of irony, as the comparison to the ‘class of schoolboys’ implies. But the insistence on ignorance ties in with another subtext, which recurs for instance in Woolf’s ‘Notes on Elizabethan Drama’ when dealing with ‘the plays of the lesser Elizabethans—Greene, Dekker, Peele, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher—to adventure into that wilderness is for the ordinary reader an ordeal’ (Woolf 1925a, 25). What the ‘lesser Elizabethans’ have in common with the Greeks is that they are ‘strange’, to quote the title of another of her essays. Reading them is not akin to visiting a monument, or to reading a text as a scholar. On the contrary, it is a daunting prospect, like finding yourself at the bottom of a class, or having to ‘adventure’ in the ‘wilderness’. This is why Woolf defines the relation to the past as a form of ‘ordeal’. Of course, this word itself is ambivalent: an ordeal is a very difficult situation, but also a form of test, a ‘trial by fire’ (from the Old French ‘ordalie’). In order to understand Woolf’s vision of history, I think it is necessary to understand what this ordeal challenges, what it brings out in the ‘ordinary reader’, which is perhaps also what the expert or scholarly reader tends to overlook.
- 2 I use the term ‘bricolage’ here with the meaning that Levi-Strauss defined in La pensée sauvage, th (...)
7Firstly, it points to a past that is too complex and fragmented to be synthesised in a single, authoritative story. Analysing the end of the pageant in Between the Acts, when the whole endeavour is broken up by a shower of rain and the actors disperse, Seamus O’Malley argues that, to Woolf, ‘traditional historical narrative, then, seems too broken a tool to live up to the ethical and political imperative to bring the past into the present’, making it necessary to use ‘more oblique but still penetrating historiographical methods to render historical objects’ (O’Malley 22). Anne Fernald has produced a detailed analysis of Woolf’s interest in Sappho and Greek texts, especially in their fragmentation and incompleteness: ‘The fragments preclude grand theories, replicating the sense of being lost, of being in the midst of shards of civilization too various to organize’ (Fernald 35). Woolf embraces this irreducible multiplicity, as it permits a form of imaginative reconstruction: ‘making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?’ (Woolf 1925a, 23). Just as the absence of people in Caister castle enabled antiquaries to speculate, the absence of any speaker of Ancient Greek enables us to make something up from what is left of it. Crucially, this experience of fragmentation and absence can be directly paralleled with another situation described by Woolf: that of the reader before a text. In the absence of its author, in the absence of the spoken word, the Common Reader must make his way through the text, ‘guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age’ (Woolf 1925a, 1). The exact same phrase ‘odds and ends’ recurs in both passages, and points to the inherent creativity, the aspect of ‘bricolage’ that is necessary to forming any narrative.2
8On the surface, this simply means that Woolf advocates a form of personal re-staging, a reconstruction of the past through the medium of lived experience. For instance, the Greek city of Sophocles (the diegetic Thebes of Oedipus Rex, but also the extra-diegetic Athens) can be ‘fashion[ed]’ by the mind from bits and pieces of present-day images, and will rise from the landscape of an English coastal village’, provided one ‘annihilate[s] the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists’ (Woolf 1925a, 24). This is in line with her reappraisal of romantic historiography, as part of what Anne Besnault calls ‘Woolf’s constant interest in the readability and representability of history’ (Besnault 2022, 40). However, focusing on the effects of the past, Woolf paints a specific picture of what reconstruction can be, how it permeates the present and how this interaction leads to distortions and misinterpretation. Not only are we liable to read the past in a partial or biased way, but also the monuments of the past may be subject to doubt. The reading of inscriptions on tombstones, which is a repeated motif throughout Woolf’s essays and fiction, is particularly telling in this regard. They are both a record of a past existence and an ambiguous source, often bearing traces of the mourners’ preoccupations rather than that of the dead individual. In Jacob’s Room, Woolf goes so far as to describe the metaphorical voices echoing through the ‘legends on the tombstones’:
[B]rief voices saying, ‘I am Bertha Ruck,’ ‘I am Tom Gage.’ . . . and the New Testament says something for them, very proud, very emphatic, or consoling.
The moors accept all that too (Woolf 1922, 183).
9These prosopopoeiac voices of the past are at the same time proof of a certain permanence, but also of a form of reduction. The narration stresses how impersonal the legends can be, through the ironic personification of the New Testament—which of course ‘said’ nothing about Bertha Ruck, and is merely quoted on the tomb—as well as the hyperbolic ‘very proud’ and ‘very emphatic’, that contrasts with the humble cemetery and the equanimity of the moors. This also refers back to the tomb of Jacob’s dead father, whose epitaph ‘A merchant of the city’, was invented by his wife ‘as an example for the boys’ when he had been idle most of his life (Woolf 1922, 15). To paraphrase a French saying, no tombstone has ever refused an epitaph.
10Hence, the voices of the past are complex and sometimes dubious, responding to certain social and cultural codes. This in turn means that they need to be interpreted, leading to a series of secondary narratives. For instance, in ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’, the rumour of the Pastons’ downfall starts from the absence of John Paston’s tombstone: ‘The news spread over the country-side. The Pastons had fallen; they that had been so powerful could no longer afford a stone to put above John Paston’s head’ (Woolf 1925a, 4). The silences and the absences in monuments are not only negative spaces: they also bear a variety of social meanings. For the pilgrims traveling to the Pastons’ estate, no tombstone means no money. The past is complex not only because it is fragmentary, but most importantly because it is a field of competing voices, all pushing towards different and sometimes contradictory interpretations of events.
11In this tension between the necessity of reading the past and the irreducible complexity of such an endeavour, I would like to argue that Woolf’s reappraisal of romantic historiography parallels that of Hans Georg Gadamer. Gadamer proposed a complex dialogue with earlier hermeneutics, especially with romantic philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, on historical representation. Rather than an act of mediation with the past leading to a ‘communion of souls’, or a search for a documented truth, he proposes to understand the ‘efficiency’ of history as a ‘process of becoming’ and signification in which the meaning of the past is a continued and always open development. Hence each new interpretation, which he likens to the reading of so many texts, ‘participates in the construction of a common meaning’ (Gadamer 132). As Jean Grondin explains, this hermeneutic viewpoint bypasses the idealism of early Twentieth Century historiography and the problems that arise when historians try to posit a scientific truth of history. Most importantly, it does away with the ideal of a ‘self-effacing’ historian. Instead of thinking that the historian can understand the past because of a core of self-evident truth, or the persistence of human nature through individual lives, Gadamer argues the exact contrary. It is because we all live a finite existence, with finite knowledge and many loose ends in our life-experience, that we can understand history as an incomplete human creation, with all its biases and blind spots (Grondin 99–102). I think that this perspective very neatly parallels Woolf’s: throughout her essays, she refuses to look for a key to the enigmas of the past, a final authoritative story, to focus instead on the blind spots, the unwritten, or even the remainder. To quote Catherine Bernard, Woolf’s essays lead us from ‘the rebus that writing would give us to decipher’ to the ‘remainder’ (in French, from the ‘rébus’ to the ‘rebut’, Bernard 252).
12Another interesting aspect of this theory is how it re-evaluates, as Woolf did, the lies and myths that people tell around past events. Indeed, the rumour of the Pastons’ demise is itself a lie: ‘The pilgrims of course were liars, as people whose eyes have just been opened by a piece of the true Cross have every right to be’ (Woolf 1925a, 4). The irony of the narrative voice stresses the contrast between on the one hand the ‘true Cross’ which the pilgrims claim to have seen and on the other hand the unreliability of their stories. Paradoxically, then, the claim to possess the one true story may be a hallmark of mythical or dogmatic discourse rather than of scientific history. Outside the divine message there exists only a web of competing rumours and reports. And where there is no set, authoritative truth, perhaps mendacity is more valuable than most give it credit for.
13This very point is made in the essay ‘Miss Mitford’, dealing with Constance Hill’s biography of Mary Russell Mitford: ‘To come to the point, the great merit of these scrapbooks, for they can scarcely be called biographies, is that they license mendacity. One cannot believe what Miss Hill says about Miss Mitford, and thus one is free to invent Miss Mitford for oneself’ (Woolf 1925a, 183). On the one hand, this commentary may be read as an underhanded and scathing critique, underlining the lack of verisimilitude of the biography. Yet it frames this lack in a positive way as a ‘licence’, opening up the possibility to ‘invent Miss Mitford for oneself’. However problematic the biography may be, it is in a sense faithful to the past in that it does not cover up its failings, the absences and voids on which it is built, and the need for an individual effort to reconstruct Mitford’s life. Ultimately, we cannot bestow meaning upon human existence without an effort of imagination. Facts without their emotional value are perhaps accurate, but not meaningful, as Woolf argues in ‘Lives of the Obscure’:
It is so difficult to keep, as we must with highly authenticated people, strictly to the facts. It is so difficult to refrain from making scenes which, if the past could be recalled, might perhaps be found lacking in accuracy. . . . we conjure up all the drama of poor Mrs. Edgeworth’s daily life; her bewilderment, her loneliness, her despair (Woolf 1925a, 114).
- 3 Though based on Lacan’s ‘L'instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient’ (Lacan 502), my analysis in th (...)
14However, the ‘licence’ imparted by the silence of monuments or the partial accounts of historians does not mean that anything can be said. The past may be irreducible to the stories told about it, but, to take up a Lacanian word, it ‘insists’ in all of them3. Indeed, Woolf presents the monuments of the past as having their own voices. They are not merely passive objects for interpretation. The past acts upon the present, especially through texts, and ‘imposes itself’, as Woolf insists in ‘Notes On Elizabethan Drama’: ‘we are apt to forget . . . how great a power the body of a literature possesses to impose itself: how it will not suffer itself to be read passively, but takes us and reads us; flouts our preconceptions’ (Woolf 1925a, 48). The past is not preserved by virtue of some sort of absolute existence, a reality beyond our reach. On the contrary, it remains because it persists: because monuments and texts, tombstones as well as plays, still present themselves to us, still ‘take us and read us’, and impel us to read them in return. This dialectic of reading and being read echoes that of ‘interpellation’ and ‘counter-interpellation’ proposed by Jean-Jacques Lecercle in Interpretation as Pragmatics. According to Lecercle, texts have the power to ‘interpellate’ their readers, through the mechanisms of language and of cultural convention. However, because they rely on these conventions, which are historical and subject to change, they cannot control the reactions which they elicit: their ‘interpellations’ lead to different responses from the readers, which in turn change their meaning and value. This constant process of ‘re-contextualisation’ is the concrete manifestation of historical becoming: the past is caught within a web of competing narratives because the events that occurred have led to many different reactions and reconstructions, just as texts written have led to many diverse and sometimes contradictory readings (Lecercle 1999, 76–79).
15Woolf embraces this parallel dialectic between author and reader on the one hand and between past and present on the other hand. This is particularly visible in the essay ‘Donne after Three Centuries’. Firstly, Woolf argues how when reading Donne’s texts ‘We feel ourselves compelled to a particular attitude of mind’: they impose a certain worldview, a particular take on reality, ‘Elements that were dispersed in the usual stream of life become one under the stroke of Donne’s passion’ (Woolf 1932, 25). Part of this feeling is due to the author, but as Woolf asserts, the voice speaking out is not solely that of an individual: ‘Soon we begin to ask ourselves of what this essence is composed. . . . Some obvious clues lie strewn on the surface of the poems’ (Woolf 1932, 26). Indeed, however personal, every voice borrows from a certain set of markers and conventions. In this respect however much Donne wanted to assert his individuality, ‘It is as if the spirit of the age, which he had scorned and flouted, suddenly asserted itself and made this rebel its slave’ (Woolf 1932, 26). As Lecercle argues, texts are always interpellating their reader but also their author. Merely by using a certain language to impose his views, Donne is also situating himself historically as the product of a certain society (Lecercle 2019, 68). As a result, ‘clues lie strewn’ for the readers to interpret. Even in texts that impose themselves as fiercely as Donne’s, ‘compelling’ certain attitudes, it is possible for the reader to go against the author’s intentions and see the blind spots, the things that Donne himself wanted to ‘flout’ but could not.
- 4 For Catherine Bernard’s use, see above. The notion of ‘remainder’ is central in Lecercle’s The Viol (...)
16In the end, there are no truth and lies, only competing, dialectical claims. Donne wished to make his personal voice heard, and ‘after three hundred years and more we still hear the sound of his voice speaking across the ages’ (Woolf 1932, 39). As readers, we have the power to ‘come to cut up’ and ‘survey each part’ of his works as doctors dissect a body. But still the power of the voice emanating from the text remains: ‘we have only to read him, to submit to the sound of that passionate and penetrating voice, and his figure rises again’ (Woolf 1932, 39). This is what I mean by the ‘insistence’ of the past. It may lend itself to all interpretations, but the texts and stories of the past all leave behind the traces of their latent contradictions, a form of ‘remainder’ of an unwritten, other story which anticipates potential future retellings and counter-histories.4
- 5 For a recent reading of Woolf’s reconfiguring of disembodied or ancestral voices in terms of lyrica (...)
17History in the eyes of Woolf therefore cannot be a simple endeavour to see the past for what it was—nor simply a theoretical activity, since etymologically theory is the contemplation of reality. If the past interpellates the present, history must consist in a form of response, a negotiation with this interpellating voice. In other words it is a certain kind of practice. And since it deals with the non-corporeal ‘voices’ emanating from the monuments of the past, as well as the texts of absent authors, this practice is in many ways similar to that of reading.5 This is why I think that the notion of a ‘praxis of reading’, which Christine Reynier explores in her analyses of Woolf’s essays, is also particularly useful in addressing her conception of history. Indeed, I would argue that Woolf’s vision of the historian is a perfect example of a kind of author who is also a reader, and who is ‘both autonomous and deeply committed’, since he or she can doubt sources, but is compelled to interpret them nonetheless (Reynier 78–79). This also ties in with what Hans Georg Gadamer calls the ‘efficiency of history’. History implicates the present, so that the historian must first and foremost be conscious of ‘what texts have to say to him [or her]’ (Gadamer 152).
18In her essays, Woolf insists on the fact that reading the past can make us conscious of our standpoint. She particularly emphasises the notion of prejudice, not only as an irrational pre-judgement, but most importantly as a sort of foundation of personal identity. In ‘Robinson Crusoe’, talking about the birth of the novel as a historical event which shattered former conceptions of literature, she adds:
difficulties arise. For we have our own vision of the world; we have made it from our own experience and prejudices, and it is therefore bound up with our own vanities and loves. It is impossible not to feel injured and insulted if tricks are played and our private harmony is upset. (Woolf 1932, 54)
19Just like her remarks on Constance Hill, this can be read as a form of taunt, mocking the smallness of personal ‘vanities’ and reading habits. But it also leads back to the ‘ordeal’ that the reader goes through when confronted with the Elizabethan plays. Behind the obstacles of fragmentary and contradictory evidence lies another, more fundamental problem: writers from the past make us aware of our vanity, of the limits of the world we construct for ourselves. A new writer: ‘inflicts his own perspective upon us so severely that as often as not we suffer agonies—our vanity is injured because our own order is upset; we are afraid because the old supports are being wrenched from us’ (Woolf 1932, 54). The fundamental ordeal suffered by historians is a confrontation with themselves.
20More specifically, the texts of the past make us aware of the historicity of our prejudices: how we have come to accept certain ideas and conventions. For instance, in ‘George Eliot’ Woolf asserts:
To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not very creditable to one’s insight, with which, half consciously and partly maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded woman. (Woolf 1925a, 154)
21There is a lack involved in prejudice, a missing information, but there is also the implication that Woolf and other readers of George Eliot had ‘accepted’ a ‘version’ of her with ‘credulity’. Furthermore, this leads to a certain ethical realisation, for, however passive, this acceptance is ‘not very creditable to one’s insight’ and is in some ways ‘malicious’. Reading a text from the past bears some risks for the ego. To quote a passage from A Room of One’s Own dealing with the texts of Mary Carmichael it may show us that, ‘instead of being serious and profound and humane, one might be—and the thought was far less seductive—merely lazy minded and conventional into the bargain’ (Woolf 2015, 69).
- 6 I have shown in ‘The Agonistics of Reading: Playing, Gambling, Committing’ how the notion of agôn a (...)
22This challenge to the ego is however endowed with a revelatory value. As Anne Besnault remarks in an article dealing with Woolf’s essayistic style, there is a paradox in the way Woolf presents personal identity: she insists on a diffraction between the outspoken ‘I’ who imposes and defines itself and other more elusive and changeable facets of the ‘self’ (Besnault 2010). The questions that the past levels at us about our own preconceptions and the proclivities of the ego may be a way to access some of the more elusive aspects of personal and communal identity. In ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, the feeling of inadequacy in front of the strangeness of Greek poetry leads to a number of questions, ‘are we not reading wrongly? losing our sharp sight in the haze of associations? reading into Greek poetry not what they have but what we lack?’ (Woolf 1925a, 35). The loss of the ‘sharp sight’ of the interpreter paradoxically leads to a challenge regarding their own inadequacies. The essay pursues this path, using the Greeks to reveal by contrast a ‘contemporary spirit’, ‘In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction’ (Woolf 1925a, 34). Confronting the difficulties of the text and the foreignness of the past constitutes an ordeal, a catastrophic breaking up, but offers a new angle implying new approaches to poetry and fiction. In that sense, the ordeal of reading past texts is also, to use the Greek word that bears the same meaning as test, an agôn.6
23This confrontation with a past that affects the present thus allows Woolf to delineate a new figure of the historian, to be paralleled with a new vision of reading: a ‘Common Historian’ to complement her ‘Common Reader’. In both cases she advocates a more personal, less scholarly and more creative relation to the source, be the author individual or collective (‘a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age’). Indeed, if the past is still ‘efficient’, still calling towards the present, the first imperative is to accept to respond, to hear it as it affects us. Perhaps the most arresting scene in this regard is the imaginary situation that Woolf describes in ‘I am Christina Rossetti’:
Suddenly there uprose from a chair and paced forward into the centre of the room a little woman dressed in black, who announced solemnly, ‘I am Christina Rossetti!’ and having so said, returned to her chair. . . . With those words the glass is broken. Yes [she seems to say], I am a poet. You who pretend to honour my centenary are no better than the idle people at Mrs. Tebb’s tea-party. (Woolf 1932, 240)
24This dramatic scene encapsulates the direct, personal power of the voices from the past. The expression ‘the glass is broken’, with the shift from past to present tense, implies that the distance between reader and character, between past and present, is shattered and that another type of relation is possible than that of simply commemorating Christina Rossetti from afar. This in turn stresses another feature of the text: the shift from the direct, first-person identification, ‘I am Christina Rossetti’ to its effect on a second person, ‘You’. The narrative voice asserts that, in defining herself, Christina Rossetti is acting upon her readers, judging them (‘You . . . are no better than the idle people at Mrs. Webb’s tea-party’). Ultimately, this interpellation translates into a form of order, an imperative which the character seems to impose on the reader, ‘Behold this green volume. It is a copy of my collected works. It costs four shillings and sixpence. Read that. And so she returns to her chair.’ (Woolf 1932, 240). The mention of the collected works and of its price are both of course historically marked. They bend the timeline back to Woolf’s epoch, where there were collected works of Christina Rossetti in paperback. The interpellation is directly addressed to Woolf’s contemporaries. The mention of the price also highlights the universality of the appeal. The character of Christina Rossetti does not ask for scholarly research, ‘rambling among unimportant trifles, rattling [her] writing-table drawers’ (Woolf 1932, 240). The only process by which she wants to be judged and remembered is the pure and simple reading of her works, which are widely available.
25This sheds light on what is perhaps the most important aspect of the ‘Common Historian’, legitimising the adjective ‘common’, the democratic principle at the heart of Woolf’s vision. Addressed personally to the reader whoever he or she may be, the call from the past is direct. Faced with this interpellation, relying on scholars and conventions is a form of escape. For Woolf’s rhetoric often plays on irony and oscillation. At the start of The Common Reader she seems to bow to traditional conceptions whereby readers must be led by critics, ‘The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously’ (Woolf 1925a, 1). Likewise, in ‘How Should One Read a Book’ she first emphasises the importance of accepting the critics’ views. But her defence of authorities is suddenly cut short by an emphatic ‘Yet how impossible!’ And she goes on to describe the inner ‘Demon’ of personal response to texts, of ‘I love, I hate’. This call back to the Socratic notion of the personal opinion as a ‘demon’ ‘whispering in the ear’ underlies Woolf’s own dialectical method, providing arguments in favour of external authorities only to end on the overwhelming importance and richness of personal reading, ‘we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it’ (Woolf 1925a, 268). Through this, to cite Anne Besnault, she ‘allows the reader . . . to remain in an empowered position of creative production, the creative production of an “active” reader who has learnt to try the accepted forms’ (Besnault 2022, 62).
26Furthermore, through the notion of impoverishment she also criticises deference. If accepting the call of the text may be risky for the reader’s ego, uncovering their biases and prejudices, refusing to commit and bowing to a critic’s opinion also has consequences. As Judith Allen argues, the goal of the narrator in Woolf’s essays is ‘to make certain that [the] readers will ultimately have the power to resist authorities’ (Allen 9). Allen ties this stance to Woolf’s implication in a broader cultural struggle, against the growing influence of experts, as expounded in her time by authors such as Walter Lippmann (Allen 106). Woolf resisted the idea that knowledgeable elites could use the new mass media of the twentieth century to guide the public towards a rational consensus on political and cultural matters. This is another common point between her and Hans Georg Gadamer. Isabel Weiss in particular has studied Gadamer’s lifelong opposition to the ‘society of experts’. According to him, abandoning personal idiosyncrasies in favour of pseudo-scientific frameworks of veracity and efficiency leaves society open to manipulations and to the control of those in power (Weiss 47).
27Therefore, instead of trying to dissolve their own personal viewpoint into a neutral, pseudo-scientific posture, Woolf beckons her readers towards accepting and embracing their idiosyncrasies, understanding their limits but also the essential originality of their contribution to the text’s meaning. As she asserts in ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia’:
Each has read differently, with the insight and the blindness of his own generation. Our reading will be equally partial. In 1930 we shall miss a great deal that was obvious in 1655; we shall see some things that the 18th century ignored. (Woolf 1932, 40)
28Faced with the ‘equal partiality’ of readings, their contextual value, the ‘Common Historians’ must add their own reading to all those that have preceded them, respecting the authorities of the past, who may provide insights inaccessible to their own generation, but all the while asserting the things they see which others ignored. This dialectic ultimately promotes a form of agency in/of the present, which parallels the agency of the reader before the text. Indeed, Woolf’s ultimate plea toward readers is to reject passivity, and to respond to texts with their own creations, blurring the line between themselves and the authors of the past. As she argues in ‘I am Christina Rossetti’: ‘Better perhaps read for oneself, expose the mind bare to the poem, and transcribe in all its haste and imperfection whatever may be the result of the impact’ (Woolf 1932, 242). Answering the interpellation from the past, responding to Christina Rossetti’s call, is always a creative process. The Common Historians’ goal is not to fix the meaning of the past, but to respond to it, and reveal the effects that it has on the present, starting with themselves. They do not so much make history as pursue it—both chasing the ever-elusive meaning of past events and acknowledging their persistence through time.
29In the end, perhaps unsurprisingly for the daughter of a historian, Virginia Woolf approached the question of history not as a relation between theories and facts, but as a form of human endeavour. Rejecting objectivity, she proposed instead to accept the irreducible contextuality of narratives regarding the past, and to view history as an interpersonal construction, through different epochs and circumstances. Undoubtedly, this vision of history also reflected her own ideas as an artist, on human experience, narrative and language. Her texts always present the world as irreducibly complex, devoid of any single authoritative meaning. To quote Bernard in The Waves, whenever someone claims to grasp the ‘whole truth’, ‘instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say’ (Woolf 1931, 155). The duty of the individual historian is not so much to try his hand at another systematic narrative as it is to say, like Bernard, ‘look’. Historians offer their own interpellation as a response to those of past texts, adding new layers of meaning, pointing to what had hitherto been kept in the background.
30This is why Woolf presents history as a necessarily ‘common’ task, both in the sense of democratic and as opposed to any individual achievement. What each individual brings is qualitatively different from any other. There are no better and no worse agents in that particular endeavour, no ‘worse educated’ individual whom ‘nature has not gifted so generously’ (Woolf 1925a, 1); only those who accept to look at themselves, reflect on their own standpoint, and those who refuse to do so and try to impose their take as the objective truth. In this sense, Woolf’s vision of history also carries an ethical and political meaning. In advocating for an open and communal reconstruction of the past, in which all voices can be heard, she is, to quote Jessica Berman, enacting a certain ‘politics of community’, ‘undermin[ing] political versions of established consensus’ (Berman 22). This of course has implications for the present. In both A Room Of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Woolf understands the political situation, the status of women, the patriarchal structure of society and its essential tendency towards violence and war as historical constructs which persist through a certain set of conventions. By breaking the consensus on the past, she is also aiming to uproot these ideologies, awakening the voices which, from the Ancient Greeks to her own times, have opposed the brutality and the immobility of the status-quo, imagined other forms of community and other possibilities for the future. In politics as in literature, she is calling for her readers to break away from the accepted norms, ‘scan the horizon; see the past in relation to the future; and so prepare the way for masterpieces to come’ (Woolf 1925a, 240).