How Should One Read a Book?

Originally delivered in 1926 as a lecture for a girls’ private school in Kent, England, Virginia Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?” explores exactly that question. The essay was published in The Yale Review (1926) and then adapted and republished in The Second Common Reader in 1932.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a leading proponent of the literary modernist movement due to her experimental narrative styles. Her novels and nonfiction explore common points of concern for modernist writers such as war, trauma, and societal stratification, especially relating to gender equality and sexual liberation. Woolf was also a lynchpin in the Bloomsbury Group, a social and intellectual coterie of young, predominantly upper-middle-class men and women with artistic tastes and pursuits. The Bloomsbury Group discussed topics like education, politics, and literature, and how they should be adapted to suit the purposes of the younger generation and modern life. In “How Should One Read a Book?” Woolf discusses the purpose and importance of reading, especially for women and girls. In discussing the role of a reader, Woolf explores the themes of The Critical Freedom of the Individual, Finding Pleasure in Art, and Art as a Reflection of the Natural World.

The guide uses the original 1926 text from The Yale Review, available online. Citations in this guide refer to paragraph numbers in that edition.

Woolf begins her essay by comparing the creation and collection of books to all other natural processes, an analogy she continues to explore throughout the essay. As naturally as the wind blows through a window, she says, all kinds of books are written throughout all of history. She makes clear early on that there is no “right” answer to the title question of her essay: “One may think about reading as much as one chooses, but no one is going to lay down laws about it” (2). Woolf explores every corner of the question, provides guidance of her own, but says that the experience of reading is an individual one. No one can or should determine what it should look like for another, no matter how much expertise that person has. She notes that, in contrast to the experience of many marginalized people in the rest of the world, freedom in reading should be given unequivocally to all.

To read a book well, Woolf argues, the reader must act as if they are writing it. Instead of judging it, the reader must involve themselves in it and try to understand the writer’s intention, inclinations, and purpose. To make this point, she compares the writer to a criminal on trial. Rather than placing oneself as the judge in the courtroom, one must instead stand “in the dock with the criminal” (5). She goes on to explore the vastly different styles of Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy, imagining how each one of them might approach writing a scene in which they meet a beggar on the street. Defoe would approach with a simple narrative, providing details and moving quickly in order to make it feel true. Austen, however, would dive into the characters, exploring their quirks and beliefs through artful introductory dialogue. Finally, Hardy’s portrayal of the beggar would be full of melodrama and connection to the natural world, and his character would be unable to look away from the darkness inside of the beggar that exists in everyone.

Woolf notes that each author knows better than to combine two perspectives, two styles, or two worlds, in any one book. And each reader will be drawn to some styles and repelled by others. A reader will have to overcome their initial biases to enjoy all styles of writing, but Woolf argues that what makes writers great is the sharp picture they paint of their own reality.

Woolf goes on to acknowledge that reading, with all its twists and turns and adjustments and biases, is an exhausting task. It is not uncommon to lose interest in a book and ask yourself questions like, “[i]s Keats a fool or am I?” (10). Woolf attributes this feeling to over-reading: Instead of leaving room for likes and dislikes and skipping and pondering, over-reading occurs when one cannot stop analyzing the text.

Woolf turns to literary forms: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Biographies, Woolf says, satisfy the universal urge to get a glimpse into someone else’s life. Rather than continuing to ask eternal questions about what other people are doing, thinking, and saying, these books provide a picture of another person’s life. She warns about the importance of keeping a fact-based work free of fictive elements, as blurring these makes the reader lose faith in the writer. Woolf considers that biographies and memoirs are meant to give the mind a break from the more immersive task of reading fiction and poetry. Rather than making its own connections and comparisons and judgments, nonfiction writing lays out facts for the reader. Woolf notes the importance of this type of reading, but she is partial to fiction and poetry; she inevitably gets tired of the limitations of nonfiction and turns to fiction, which she says contains both the truth that nonfiction provides and the intensity that she thinks nonfiction lacks. Woolf posits that poetry specifically contains truths that cannot be expressed otherwise. Poetry lets the imagination run wild, letting any reader draw comparisons between their own life and what is expressed in the poetry.

Woolf then explores the second layer of reading: the work of critics and thoughtful readers alike, which is that of judgment. Until this step, the reader has only been responsible for finding meaning in the words. During the process of initial reading, feelings are fleeting and ever-changing, but afterwards, the story will come to the reader in some unexpected moment outside of reading. Only then can they start the process of judgment, which asks the reader to uncover the author’s intention, the influence of the time period, their relationships, the comparisons between this text and others of its time. There will not be clear answers to these questions, but the act of asking them brings the reader closer to the truth. This process allows one to begin answering the questions that arise while reading: What work is good? What work is bad? What was the author trying to do here?

In reviewing her essay’s main points, Woolf repeats the fact that reading is different for everyone and that there is not one answer. She argues that, during the judgment process, each book deserves the benefit of being compared to the best of its kind. A reader should be true to their own instincts, generous in their initial reading, thoughtful in their judgments, and daring in what they choose to read next. In giving a book the attention and care it deserves, a reader can even indirectly help writers continue their work.

To end her essay, Woolf steps back to admire the true reason one reads: pleasure. This is impossible to define, impossible to account for, yet stronger than any other. She ends her essay by positing that humanity’s love of reading accounts for all growth, all progress, and all the reasons people wake up and laugh, build, share, and evolve. To conclude, while she has given other reasons one should read thoughtfully, she admits that the act of reading is simply a pleasure.