Virginia Woolf was a critic before she was a novelist. Her first piece for the Times Literary Supplement, a column-and-a-half on two literary travel guides, was published in 1905, when she was twenty-three.Footnote 1 Her last, a page-and-a-half on the works of William Congreve, appeared in 1937.Footnote 2 Over thirty-two years, she wrote hundreds of reviews, often to a remarkably tight schedule. The TLS “sends me one novel every week,” she wrote to a friend in November 1905, “which has to be read on Sunday, written on Monday, and printed on Friday.”Footnote 3 This kind of work was not untypical of the age, but it was gruelling: George Orwell, one-time literary editor of the Tribune, described it as “quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting.”Footnote 4 Even so, Woolf credited it highly in her development. “I learnt a lot of my craft writing for [the TLS’s editor Bruce Richmond]: how to compress; how to enliven; & also was made to read with a pen & notebook, seriously.”Footnote 5
From a medievalist’s perspective, it is not hard to see how review essays of the kind published in the TLS, and later in the NYRB and LRB, might help to hone the “craft” of writing. Many of the form’s requirements—grabbing and sustaining a reader’s interest; expressing an argument succinctly and precisely; balancing a larger narrative with detailed description—are important to any kind of academic composition, from the research article to the monograph. And reflecting critically and carefully on others’ writing is bound to make you think more deeply about your own. It is no coincidence that guides such as Strunk and White’s devote much attention to the skills Woolf claimed to have gained on Grub Street.Footnote 6 Perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to see some seeds of her meticulous, elliptical style in the terse columns she wrote for the Lit Supp.
But what of that other craft? Woolf, after all, reflected that reviewing had made her not just a better writer, but also a better, more serious reader. Admittedly, to her, the one was never very different from the other. Discussing how to read, she suggested doing so “as if one were writing”; discussing how to write, she reflected that it was “impossible to read too much.”Footnote 7 Yet among scholars—and even among critics—reviewers have not typically enjoyed a reputation for astuteness. “Reviewing is a kind of rapid-eye-movement of judgment, which barely lasts the night and is promptly forgotten,” James Wood wrote in the LRB. Footnote 8 As early as the seventeenth century, the satirist Samuel Butler described the critic as little more than “a very ungentle reader.”Footnote 9
On the face of it, they have a point. Literary history is littered with reviews that, with hindsight, turned out to be hopelessly wrong. A thought for Dr Joseph Collins of the New York Times, who wrote about Joyce’s Ulysses that the “average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it … save bewilderment and a sense of disgust.”Footnote 10 Or for the anonymous TLS reviewer of Evelyn Waugh’s first book Rossetti (the poet Sturge Moore), who praised the book tepidly and referred to its author as “Miss” throughout.Footnote 11 Gaffes are as old as the discipline: if critics had been around in Cædmon’s day, one of them would no doubt have deemed his hymn “rustic” or “flat-footed.” And so much fun has, over the years, been had with the poor reviewer, that figure of (at best) mild obtuseness or (at worst) wilful dishonesty.Footnote 12 In this essay, I’ll try to take a more charitable view. Looking to some of my own experiences as a medievalist who also writes and edits book reviews, I’ll offer some reflections on the mode of reading encouraged by reviewing, and what that mode might offer us as scholars of medieval literature.
1. Reviewing and re-reading
When I joined the staff of the TLS, one of the first documents I was handed was a copy of the paper’s Style Guide. In its current iteration, the usage handbook contains a short foreword by Stig Abell, editor between 2016 and 2020, in which he lays out his vision for a good TLS review:
One of the true pleasures of the TLS should be that a reader can never entirely predict what subject might be covered, at what length or in what way. They should be able to predict, though, that the prose will be consistently excellent, and the product itself the subject of as much critical thinking as possible. To examine the matter from the opposite end: our great enemy is the perfunctory, the dutiful or the uninteresting.Footnote 13
These ideas are elaborated over the pages that follow. The best reviews, Abell writes, avoid cliché; make remarkable the recondite or the dusty; read closely and rigorously; contain memorable moments. Stylishness is encouraged; personal anecdotes permitted, particularly when reflective of expertise. The article that emerges sits somewhere between the academic and the journalistic, with certain aspects veering towards the former (“apt quotation is critical”) and others breaking consciously towards the latter (“never publish any academic jargon, except to criticize it”).
This makes it, in some ways, a throwback. When the TLS was first published in 1902, the gap between scholarship and journalism was much narrower than it is today. John Guillory has assiduously charted this schism, describing how, as the discipline professionalised, the function of criticism shifted from judgment to interpretation, and critics gradually evolved “from arbiters of taste and purveyors of opinion in the public sphere” to specialised professionals writing for other specialised professionals.Footnote 14 Like a kind of reverse Vatican II, scholars turned from the parish to the altar. The review essay, however, remained anchored in the nave. John Sturrock, a long-time editor for both the TLS and the LRB, saw this as its strength:
It could be said that the ideal contribution to papers like the TLS or LRB should strike academic readers as journalistic and journalistic readers as academic. And having thus set out our stall, we marginals can face in both directions at once and take up our remit as honest brokers.Footnote 15
I’m inclined to agree. The best reviews, as Sturrock pointed out, see the centre from the periphery, surveying the academic field while remaining, in style and sensibility, perched outside it.
So, what kind of reading underpins this all? Like Guillory’s nineteenth-century critics, a reviewer (perhaps I really mean this reviewer) reads with an eye to evaluating rather than interpreting. They try to be generous but critical, reading not just to summarise a book’s argument but to assess it. Another eye is kept on the piece to be written. Reviewers are magpies: anything shiny is hoarded. This is true on the level of the detail, where pithy anecdotes might be underlined for use when the review needs a spark, and stylistic habits, flourishes or oddities might be noted down for comment. And it is true on the level of the narrative. Good reviews are not like good books, and TLS subscribers aren’t Speculum readers: to avoid “plodding through each chapter,” as Abell puts it, the book needs distilling into its most illuminating or memorable stories and ideas. When the review deals with medieval history or literature, these have in turn to be contextualised, and their significance explained. Reviewing requires an alertness to, and intuition for, what can be made to sing beyond the discipline.
I use the word “intuition” advisedly: reviewing is often an instinct-led undertaking. That is not to say it is artless. The form, rather, invites personal reflection, and, at its best, a kind of reading led by curiosity and pleasure. It is sometimes said among editors that the best critic for a particular book is one who has not asked to review it—one, in other words, who will approach the text as a learned stand-in for the general reader, without any strong predilections. I’m not sure things are so clear-cut, but I agree with the sentiment that great reviews are often the product of a hunch. The reviews I’m happiest with are those in which I’ve been able to follow my instincts. In a recent (non-medieval) tennis-themed piece, that meant tracing a lineage from the tennis scenes in Lolita to the rivalry between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal; in an article on two books about the Old English Chronicles, it involved exploring the tension between the received idea of the chronicles as the “backbone” of early English history and their ungraspable nature as documents.Footnote 16 In both cases, the review’s narrative formed out of an engagement with the texts in a direct, personal way—not as a scholar, but as a reader.
With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, how we engage with texts has suddenly become a more urgent question. As search engines, online libraries and journal systems have begun to offer AI-generated reviews and overviews as standard, we might ask what it is that we as human readers can offer that such algorithmic distillations cannot. One of our strengths, I think, is this ability, encouraged by reviewing, to follow a hunch—to chase unforeseen connections and affinities. AI can scan a poem, pre-empt the next predictable word or rhyme, or compare it to contemporaneous sources. What it cannot do is respond to those more subtle reflexes, those things that happen below the level of meter or context. In Senses of Style, a study of Thomas Wyatt and Frank O’Hara, the scholar and poet Jeff Dolven describes likeness in literature as an elusive “feeling that things just go together.”Footnote 17 Similarities can be surprising and ingenious, he shows, and a fruitful dialogue can be established between the most implausible of locutors.Footnote 18 For this to work, however, a reader must cultivate their own naïve receptiveness to things that happen nebulously in language and style. As medievalists, we can be especially squeamish about admitting to instinctive feelings about what we read. We’re trained to be acutely conscious of our distance from our material, of the chasm between the world we study and the one we inhabit. But the vices of the scholar are the virtues of the critic. Reviewing invites a willingness to be impressionable; the reading that this brings about might offer something of an antidote against the mindless compiling and relaying of machines.
2. Reviewing and re-viewing
It’s easy to forget the extent to which how we read is mediated by why we read. “A professional,” writes Merve Emre, “is not unlike a racehorse that has worn blinders long enough to have grown numb to the feel of them.”Footnote 19 Over the last decades, to be fair, literary scholars have become increasingly reflexive about their blinders, and increasingly interested in “nondisciplinary” alternatives to their institutional forms of reading, from Eve Sedgwick’s “reparative reading” to Rita Felski’s “postcritique.”Footnote 20 As medievalists, however, it is tempting to feel insulated from these trends. Our subjects of study exist firmly in the (distant) past. We tend to know nothing about how they were received by their original readers, and they are rarely encountered first-hand by modern audiences. In the case of Old English, Latin and Old Norse, which require specialist knowledge, this institutionalisation is (at least in Britain) absolute: while the Austenites have book clubs and societies to reckon with, we can sit peacefully within our library walls.
I’ve found that the kind of reading encouraged by reviewing helps me step back from this bubble, and regain the senses of pleasure and inquiry that sit at the root of any literature. The lais of Marie de France, Canterbury Tales and Old English riddles were, after all, written to be enjoyed. Thinking about whether we enjoy them, and why, can in turn help to think about the texts afresh. Why do I love Egils saga but not Sturlunga saga? (I’d wager it’s because the former is a masterpiece, with flashes of startling interiority and wonderful poetry, and the latter is, for large swathes, an indistinct muddle of pointless violence.) And why do I find myself revisiting the first half of Beowulf, but not the second? (Because the strangely human Grendel and his mother are two of the most interesting monsters in medieval literature, and the dragon is not.) Medieval texts are, of course, not the same as modern novels and poems. Yet “reviewing” them in these terms can, I think, help us to do as Susan Sontag preached, to “cut back content so that we can see the thing.”Footnote 21
Certainly, reading books for review has often allowed me to see the thing, or see it anew. Covering Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm’s enlightening survey of medieval understandings of time, I was reminded of Chaucer’s opening to the Canterbury Tales, where he quips that April, with its sweet life-giving showers, budding leaves and twittering birds, inspires people “to goon on pilgrimages.”Footnote 22 As poetry, it’s an undeniably brilliant set piece—one that I suspect many medievalists can recite from memory. As a joke, I’d always found it hopelessly flat. Adler and Strohm indirectly offer an answer as to why. Medieval audiences, they explain, experienced the seasons differently, and had a much more acute sense of April as a time of both natural and spiritual regeneration. Chaucer’s conceit, in other words, hinged on a tension that I failed to feel. Reading Adler and Strohm—and, by extension Chaucer—with a reviewer’s mindset drew out this distance more acutely than any academic engagement had. Changing the context of my reading changed my reading of the context.
So too when I reviewed Shane Bobrycki’s (similarly excellent) history of crowds in the early Middle Ages.Footnote 23 Here, I was nagged by the question of why Bobrycki’s description of the bustling early medieval English towns of York and Lundenwic sat so uncomfortably with my sense of the period. Revisiting Old English poems, from the elegies to Beowulf, I was struck—as I had been as an undergraduate—by their sense of loneliness and isolation, and reminded how much they had coloured my perception of the period at large. The task of reviewing Bobrycki brought out how different the world of “The Wanderer” must have been from that of, say, a ninth-century London merchant. And how strange some aspects of the poem must have seemed, had such a merchant had the chance to hear or read it. Would that strangeness have been part of the appeal? Letting myself be led by hunches and evaluative instincts—by the uneasy sense that the world of the poems was ineffable, possibly not just to me but also to an early medieval audience—prompted me to reflect on the assumptions I brought to the texts, and illuminated aspects that I’d previously glossed over.
Working with critics, I’ve been struck again and again by the space reviewing creates for reconsidering medieval texts and authors in such ways. One of my jobs as an editor—alongside the obvious sharpening of sentences, trimming of jargon and clarifying of narrative—is to coax scholars away from the rigidity and formality of academic writing. Such coaxing, I’ve learnt, is an acquired skill. Forced jollity, as anyone who has been on a team-building day will know, is hardly jolly, and asking someone to have fun with a piece is not usually how you end up with a fun piece. More fruitful is to take the place of the naïve reader, and ask the kinds of specific, targeted questions that such naivety inspires. What is it about Julian of Norwich that still generates such intense devotion? Could the Canterbury Tales have been written in tetrameters rather than pentameters? Daniel Wakelin’s masterful discussion of the latter in his review of the recent Oxford Chaucer reflects on the challenges and the rewards of the five-stress line from the perspective of the reader. The poet’s use of the meter, he shows, is a “pleasure not only to critique, but to hear,” with space for everything from the philosophical to the earthy.Footnote 24 I know of no better introduction to its revolutionary brilliance.
The best medievalist critics, as Wakelin’s review attests, are able to approach their subjects in ways that are academically rigorous, but also intimate and subjective. Since Euan Roger and Sebastian Sobecki’s discoveries surrounding the so-called “Chaumpaigne release”—which suggested that Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne were co-defendants in the case that had long cast him as a possible rapist—the TLS has run a number of pieces in which scholars have thought about their own relationship with the writer.Footnote 25 Mary C. Flannery discussed the “relief” and “anger” felt by Chaucerians in the aftermath of the revelations, reflecting on “how much our own perspectives and feelings shape the stories we tell about the past.”Footnote 26 Mary Wellesley, reviewing Flannery’s Chaucer biography, questioned whether his work was really as open to marginal voices as we sometimes think. “It’s an attractive view … and one we like as modern readers,” Wellesley wrote. “I confess I like it too.”Footnote 27 Wellesley, like Flannery, set out her stall outside the academy, and used it as a platform to think, on a personal level, about the biases that colour it. Not a word of Latin in it.
***
Reflections on the value of (academic) book reviewing sometimes mention its practical benefits: access to books, training in communication, experience in publishing.Footnote 28 More valuable, I think, are its creative benefits. As academic and journalistic practices have diverged, book reviews can offer us space as medievalists to think about our subject in fresh—or perhaps refreshingly old—ways. It’s telling that when, in 1938, Virginia Woolf prepared to write a survey of English literary history (a project started in earnest in 1940 and cut tragically short by her death the following year), it was to her “innumerable T.L.S. notes” that she turned.Footnote 29 Binding them together, she hoped would offer material for a critical overview of “English lit: as I’ve read it & noted it during the past 20 years.”Footnote 30 Woolf was an extraordinary critic, whose analysis would have been as masterful in a postcard as in a monograph. Yet I like to think, as Woolf did, that the review essay played at least some part in helping her hone that skill. “How pleased I used to be when L. called me ‘You’re wanted by the Major Journal!,’ & I ran down to the telephone to take my almost weekly orders at Hogarth House,” she wrote, remembering her first commissions.Footnote 31 How pleased we are that she wanted the Major Journal too.
Author contributions
Conceptualization: P.S.; Formal analysis: P.S.; Investigation: P.S.; Writing - original draft: P.S.
Funding statement
This work is supported by the AHRC OOC-DTP, the Clarendon Fund, and Magdalen College, Oxford.
Open access
