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Maria DiBattista is professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton University. Her books include Virginia Woolf's Major Novels and Fast-Talking Dames.

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"This book is a lively, original, and very interesting personal reading of Virginia Woolf, sensitively done and well-written. It is clever and illuminating to approach Woolf through the idea of the writerly personae, rather than biographically or in more conventionally critical ways. I enjoyed this book very much and was impressed and refreshed by it."--Hermione Lee, author ofVirginia Woolf and Edith Wharton

"Few critics have the skill to make us see anew; few have taken Woolf's love of words and her own study of their characteristics as seriously as DiBattista does here. By the time one finishes the book, DiBattista has given us a new perspective on Woolf, her love of language, and her sense of the relationship between words, the self, and the personalities inscribed therein."--Brenda R. Silver, Dartmouth College

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"This book is a lively, original, and very interesting personal reading of Virginia Woolf, sensitively done and well-written. It is clever and illuminating to approach Woolf through the idea of the writerly personae, rather than biographically or in more conventionally critical ways. I enjoyed this book very much and was impressed and refreshed by it."--Hermione Lee, author ofVirginia Woolf and Edith Wharton

"Few critics have the skill to make us see anew; few have taken Woolf's love of words and her own study of their characteristics as seriously as DiBattista does here. By the time one finishes the book, DiBattista has given us a new perspective on Woolf, her love of language, and her sense of the relationship between words, the self, and the personalities inscribed therein."--Brenda R. Silver, Dartmouth College

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Imagining Virginia Woolf

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

The Figment of the Author

How should one read a book? VirginiaWoolf first asked this question nearly a century ago, but the years have, if anything, made the question more, not less urgent. Books about how to read (a poem, a novel) periodically appear, as do books-How Proust Can Change Your Life, Reading Lolita in Tehran, The Little Chinese Seamstress-chronicling the emotional and political benefits of reading. There are even books, like Pierre Bayard's How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read, that suggest how not to read a book and still get some benefit from it. Finally there are books that promise that anyone can become a reader, even the Queen of England, as happens in Alan Bennett's droll fantasy, The Uncommon Reader, in which Her Majesty, to the surprise of her subjects and the chagrin of her retinue, develops a late-life passion for reading so voracious and ardent that Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, NancyMitford, and Jean Genet are devoured with equal and unmitigated pleasure.

These books, whatever their individual merits and degrees of seriousness, and whether or not we actually consult them, serve as important reminders of how valuable, and yet fragile, a human art reading continues to be. That reading enhances life is the recurring theme of these works, a view I share but do not directly comment upon in this book. Instead I concern myself with a slightly different and probably less creditable question, one less frequently asked but perhaps of more personal interest to us as readers, namely, how one should read an author? This question is generally raised, if at all, in literary biographies. Asking it here in a work of literary criticism may strike some readers as impertinent. After all, reading has its protocols like any other form of human encounter. One of the fundamental rules we are taught to observe in reading imaginative literature is not to treat the author like a character in his or her own work. We are instructed (often scolded) to respect the difference between an author and a narrator and not to mistake the person who speaks to us in an essay for the much less accountable person hunched over the page-or, now more likely, over the keyboard-who is wrestling with all the fiends who bedevil the makers of sentences.

Still, no matter how sophisticated we may be in separating the narrative or essayistic "I" from the author, we often find that our reading becomes so intense that this distinction becomes increasingly unimportant, a finery only pedants would insist we adhere to. We want, even yearn, to know who the author is and what he or she thinks about things. "What interests the reader," writes Seor C, the writer impersonated by J. M. Coetzee in Diary of a Bad Year, is the quality of the author's "opinions themselves-their variety, their power to startle, the ways in which they match or do not match the reputations of their authors." Even otherwise disciplined academic critics routinely disregard such principled separation of author and writerly persona in fashioning adjectives out of proper nouns in order to designate a certain authorial "style" or way of looking at the world. Hence the untroubled, indeed often knowing and confident, way critics as well as common readers are inclined to invoke "signature styles": heroic humanity is Homeric or Shakespearean; a lyric feeling is Miltonic or Words worthian; social canvasses are Balzacian or Dickensian; unfailing artistic intelligence is Flaubertian or Jamesian; psychological nightmares are Dostoevskian or Conradian; modern epics are Tolstoyan or Joycean. These coinages signal that we have identified something quintessential about a writer's style or manner of interpreting and representing experience. To describe a style as Faulknerian or Beckettian or Nabokovian, to take other and equally apposite examples, conjures up a host of literary moods, dispositions, and temperaments that coalesce to form an imprint as distinctive as a genetic code. This imprint, a trace-code of the authorial DNA, is our primary way of distinguishing the focused person who writes from that "bundle of accidents and incoherence that sits down at breakfast," as Yeats somewhat comically described the writer of prose.

Yet however expert we become in deciphering the authorial code, we can never know the person who writes directly through her writing. This is an odder claim than it may initially appear, when you consider that the writer may divulge the most intimate secrets of her inner life through the very things she chooses to write about and by the way she writes about them. I want to make an even odder claim and insist that the person who writes never appears to us except as a figment of our imagination. This is what I mean by my title, "imagining" Virginia Woolf. I don't mean by this that I am making her up or attributing qualities to her that she may not indeed possess. Quite the opposite. It is Woolf who makes things up, who makes herself up-that is what it means, at a very fundamental level, to have an imagination and to use it in your writing. What I fabricate is an image of her that has slowly formed in my mind-a figment I call it-from the impressions, some more concrete than others, that I collect as I am reading her. This figment of the author may coexist with, but should never be mistaken for, the "figure of the author." I suspect it matters little to most readers whether the author as a literary figure is dead or alive or temporarily missing in action. On the other hand, the figment, being a subjective creation and not a rhetorical or literary personification, has a different reality and possesses a different importance in the mind of the reader. The figment of the author that attends us in our reading tends to be evanescent, is often misconceived, but is never insubstantial in its impact upon us.

It was Woolf who alerted me to the inevitability of these figments and of their power to shadow and ultimately affect our intellectual and emotional relation to what we are reading. The first concrete piece of advice she gives the reader in "How Should One Read a Book?" is to try to become the author, but then, in a reversal that becomes more and more typical of her as she becomes so confident in her own opinions that she can afford to qualify and, when necessary, disregard them, she admits her inability to follow her own advice:

We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our own identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathise wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, "I hate, I love," and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it.

The demon who whispers to us, I hate and I love, is the guardian (or fallen) angel who prevents our total imaginative surrender to the...