The Tale of Genji, by Virginia Woolf

Abstract

In 1925, English writer Virginia Woolf published in Vogue magazine an enthusiastic review of orientalist Arthur Waley’s translation of “The Tale of Genji”; written in the early 11th century and attributed to writer and poet Murasaki Shikibu, it is considered to be one of the first Japanese novels. Although brief, the article sustains the practice of literary criticism championed by Woolf at the time by combining the writer’s own research of women’s authorship and the notion of a “common reader”, also by Woolf, in face of a literary text, free from academic restraints.