A ‘Common History’: Anonymous Artists, Communal Collectivities

Abstract

As mentioned before, the first book Woolf proposed to write early in her career was a ‘solid’ historical book. ‘I am going to produce a real historical work this summer; for which I have solidly read and annotated 4 volumes of medieval English’, she writes to Violet Dickinson in 1905.² However, she began such work only at the end of her life, while she was writing Between the Acts. Hers would be a ‘Common History’ of England, which signalled her continuous interest in and vindication of the lives and opinions of the ‘common’, exemplified by her two volumes of essays dedicated to The Common Reader.³ Woolf had planned to call her history book ‘Reading at Random’ or later ‘Turning the Page’ and to write it in the mode of literary history, drawing on memoirs, chronicles, (auto)biographies and histories alongside literary works. Of this work what evidence survives are the drafts and typescripts of its possible overall structure with the title ‘Notes for Reading at Random’, the first chapter entitled ‘Anon’ and the beginning of the second chapter called ‘The Reader’.⁴

Making literature into an organon of history and not reducing literature to the material of history is the task of the literary historian.

(W. Benjamin)¹