The Essay as Form

Abstract

The interest in questions of marginality that characterises Woolf’s focus on eccentrics, obscure and Anon also marks her reading of the history of the essay as a genre. Woolf wrote extensively both on the essay and on specific essayists throughout her career, starting in 1905 with the ‘Decay of Essay-writing’ and up to her essay on De Quincey published in the second Common Reader (1932). Her approach to the history and to the nature of the genre was always marked by an attempt to identify within what she saw as a male tradition an alternative line of descent to which she could affiliate herself. This she outlined by stressing the connection between the essay and autobiography, but a type of autobiography which she insisted was essentially non-narrative and presented the self as a conglomeration of moments of perception and reflection. In reading the essay as an autobiographical genre Woolf thus defined a form of writing that could bring together criticism and the private experience of reading in an intimate kind of historiography that allowed her to speak of and through the gaps which narrative sequence had conspired to close off.