Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (review)

What I hate about this book is the spine: it's already creaking and I'm worried it will give way soon. This is deplorable, because Melba Cuddy-Keane's Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere is a book that Woolf enthusiasts, from professional scholars to general readers, will want to come back to again and again. Woolf wrote over five hundred essays, published in more than forty periodicals, between 1904 and 1941: a body of work more daunting than the fourteen novels and thus more likely to be dipped into rather than examined as a body of work by scholars. Yet Woolf's non-fiction not only reached a wide public, it helped define, and create, that public. In that sense, the essays and reviews are even more significant than the novels, and Cuddy-Keane's book is quite simply the best book we have on Woolf's non-fiction.

Cuddy-Keane advances the provocative terms 'democratic highbrow' and 'classless intellectual' as a way of locating Woolf's position and her strategy. One of the pleasures of the book is the attention it gives to terms. We learn that 'highbrow' refers literally to the space between eyebrow and hairline, the height of the forehead. More fraught than 'intellectual,' 'highbrow' designates an attitude as well as a subgroup, a subgroup with attitude – the lofty perspective of the intellectual upon the non-intellectual. But it also betrays an attitude towards intellectuals on the part of the user of the term; it is at once pejorative and defensive.

Drawing on Raymond Williams, Cuddy-Keane argues that while intellectual culture might not be popular in the sense of being widely favoured, it may be popular in the sense of being open to and generated by subgroups of the whole. Woolf challenges the assumption that high-, middle-, and lowbrow correspond to high, middle, and low class. This is the difference between Richard Altick's notion of the English Common Reader and Woolf's: for him it's the mass reading public, drawn from the labouring class; for her it signifies a mode of reading, not a social being. Reading that is not professional reading, and that is not tied to class.

Further, Cuddy-Keane examines the conditions of production that were catering to, and producing, the common reader. The 1920s and 1930s saw a flood of books on reading, and organizations to promote reading sprang up, such as the Book Society (1927) modelled on the Book-of-the-Month Club in the United States. Dent, with their Everyman's library, was able in 1926 to make a profit of eleven times the invested capital. In 1935 Penguin began to publish books of 'good literature for the price of a package of cigarettes' (and Woolf's first Common Reader was one of their early selections). So even as more and more readers were being turned into students through the universities and the adult education system, much of the marketing was being aimed at non-academic readers, those whom Woolf hoped to reach.

Woolf felt English studies in the university institutionalized reading, threatened to create a gap between professional study of literature and the general reading public. (In 'Why,' Woolf describes the lecture as 'an obsolete custom which not merely wastes time and temper, but incites the most debased of human passions – vanity, ostentation, self-assertion, and the desire to convert.') So in her essays she developed an alternative pedagogy: 'Positing theories through questions rather than statements, through the applied test of specific works rather than abstract conceptualizations, and in accessible rather than abstruse language.' This is at the heart of Woolf's writing, Cuddy-Keane argues, and such writing provides a useful model in today's 'post-theory' climate.

So too does Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Theory is here, from Benjamin, Bourdieu, and Bakhtin to Radway, Poovey, and Herrnstein Smith, but always applied, always contextualized. Cuddy-Keane is generous in her acknowledgment of the...