Reading at Random with Virginia Woolf by Frances Lindemann
“Let us try then to recapture some actual experience, which seems to have a connection with the experience of reading these old books; to spring from poetry; to be interfused with the same emotion,” Virginia Woolf writes in one of many fragmentary drafts of her final book, a history of English literature whose working titles included “Reading at Random.” It was to be nothing less than her own philosophy of reading. More than mere absorption of the written word, reading, for Woolf, was an active expression of the mind and a mode of “actual experience.” At the time of her death in March 1941, Woolf had begun work on only two chapters of the book, titled “Anon” and “The Reader.” The New York Public Library’s Berg Collection holds the full archive of “Reading at Random,” including multiple manuscript and typescript drafts of each chapter, as well as Woolf’s initial reading notes. The project is little-known and hardly legible, composed as it is of disintegrating notebooks and unbound pages
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