To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau‘s birth, Virginia Woolf wrote an essay about Thoreau for the Times Literary Supplement in July of 1917.
Woolf was actually an admirer of American writers like Thoreau because she felt that they were more inventive and adventurous than British writers, who she believed were sometimes too reserved and cautious.
Despite Woolf’s upper-class British upbringing, she seems to have understood Thoreau better than many modern American readers and even more so than some of his own peers, such as Woolf’s American godfather James Russell Lowell, who had a feud with Thoreau.
Woolf saw Thoreau not as a misanthropic hermit trying to hide from society in the woods, as many modern readers mistakenly do, but as a “noble” rebel trying to teach his fellow man his philosophy on life through his writing and actions.
It was as if Woolf saw Thoreau as she saw herself, a misfit trying to invent a new way of life, much like she and her fellow Bloomsbury Group members were attempting to do in 20th-century London.
Many literary critics have even drawn comparisons between the Bloomsbury group and the Concord transcendentalist writers, which include Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott, and Hawthorne, nicknaming them the “American Bloomsbury.”
Woolf seems to have picked up on these similarities well before anyone else did, and instead of distancing herself from her American counterparts, fully embraced them.
Woolf’s essay on Thoreau, despite the fact that it was published nearly a century ago, remains to this day one of the most insightful, thoughtful, and intelligent tributes to this all too often misunderstood man.
If you’d like to read Woolf’s essay, I have published an annotated edition of Walden, which includes the essay as the foreword. It is available on Amazon.
Here is an excerpt of Virginia Woolf’s essay:
Thoreau by Virginia Woolf
“A hundred years ago today, on 12 July, 1817, was born Henry David Thoreau, the son of a pencil-maker in Concord, Massachusetts. He has been lucky in his biographers, who have been attracted to him not by his fame so much as by their sympathy with his views, but they have not been able to tell us a great deal about him that we shall not find in the books themselves. His life was not eventful; he had, as he says, ‘a real genius for staying at home’. His mother was quick and voluble, and so fond of solitary ramblings that one of her children narrowly escaped coming into the world in an open field. The father, on the other hand, was a ‘small, quiet, plodding man’, with a faculty for making the best lead pencils in America, thanks to a secret of his own for mixing levigated plumbago with fuller’s earth and water, rolling it into sheets, cutting it into strips, and burning it. He could at any rate afford with much economy and a little help to send his son to Harvard, although Thoreau himself did not attach much importance to this expensive opportunity. It is at Harvard, however, that he first becomes visible to us. A class-mate saw much in him as a boy that we recongise later in the grown man, so that instead of a portrait we will quote what was visible about the year 1837 to the penetrating eye of the Rev. John Weiss:
‘He was cold and unimpressible. The touch of his hand was most and indifferent, as if he had taken up something when he saw your hand coming, and caught your grasp on it. How the prominent grey-blue eyes seemed to rove down the path, just in advance of his feet, as his grave Indian stride carried him down to University Hall. He did not care for people; his class-mates seemed very remote. This reveries hung always about him, and not so loosely as the odd garments which the pious household care furnished. Thought had not yet awakened his countenance; it was serene, but rather dull, rather plodding. The lips were not yet firm; there was almost a look of smug satisfaction lurking round their corners. It is plain now that he was preparing to hold his future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their importance. The nose was prominent, but its curve fell forward without firmness over the upper lip, and we remember him as looking very much like some Egyptian sculpture of faces, large-featured, but brooding, immobile, fixed in a mystic egoism. Yet his eyes were sometimes searching, as if he had dropped, or expected to find, something. In fact his eyes seldom left the ground, even in his most earnest conversations with you…’
He goes on to speak of the ‘reserve and inaptness’ of Thoreau’s life at college. Clearly, the young man thus depicted, whose physical pleasures took the form of walking and camping out, who smoked nothing but ‘dried lily stems’, who venerated Indian relics as much as Greek classics, who in early youth had formed the habit of ‘settling accounts’ with his own mind in a diary, where his thoughts, feelings, studies, and experiences had daily to be passed under review by that Egyptian face and searching eye – clearly this young man was destined to disappoint both parents and teachers and all who wished him to cut a figure in the world and become a person of importance. His first attempts to earn his living in the ordinary way by becoming a schoolmaster was brought to an end by the necessity of flogging his pupils. He proposed to talk morals to them instead. When the committee pointed out that the school would suffer from the ‘undue leniency’ Thoreau solemnly beat six pupils and then resigned, saying that school-keeping ‘interfered with his arrangements’. The arrangements that the penniless young man wished to carry out were probably assignments with certain pine trees, pools, wild animals, and Indian arrowheads in the neighborhood, which had already laid their commands upon him.
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