WHO’S AFRAID OF EDMUND SPENSER?

To the Editors:

There is a list in Catherine Nicholson’s article on Edmund Spenser [“The Triumph of Mutabilitie,” NYR, July 1] of writers who found The Faerie Queene ponderous. The concluding witness is Virginia Woolf: “To those eager to cultivate an appreciation for Spenser, she counseled, ‘The first essential is, of course, not to read The Faerie

Queene.’”

It is not a made-up quotation. All twelve

words are there. You can find it in The Moment and Other Essays (published in 1947). Here’s Virginia Woolf at more length:

The first essential is, of course, not to read The Faery Queen. Put it off as long as possible. Grind out politics; absorb science; wallow in fiction; walk about London; observe the crowds; calculate the loss of life and limb;...and then, when the whole being is red and brittle as sandstone in the sun, make a dash for The Faery Queen and give yourself up to it.

There is a more quotable passage later in the essay when she sums up Spenser’s charm:

It is a world of astonishing physical brilliance and intensity; sharpened, intensified as objects are in a clearer air; such as we see them, not in dreams, but when all the faculties are alert and vigorous.

One tone-deaf moment in a three-page article is slight, almost too slight to mention, but the misleading quotation certainly makes Virginia Woolf sound dismissive and obtuse. I don’t know whether I am writing to defend Spenser’s reputation or hers.

Michael Beard St. Paul, Minnesota