Another term to describe a reader who ‘profit[s] by what they read, and enable[s] others to profit by it also’ is a literary critic — at least, any literary critic worthy of the title should aspire to be such a reader. That so many of our literary critics, entombed in university departments and the labyrinthine corridors of institutional life, often fail to convert their reading into insights from which others might also profit is largely because they no longer aspire to share their knowledge, but to wield it like a weapon. To read literary criticism of this ilk is to be beaten over the head with prose so dense and impenetrable that it bludgeons rather than enlightens. But all hope is not lost, for outside the universities’ thick walls, a group of disaffected critics are busily redefining and reinvigorating their craft.
Among this group is writer and critic Joanna Biggs, whose new book, A Life of One’s Own: Nine Writers Begin Again, is refreshingly accessible. Following the death of her mother and the collapse of her marriage, Biggs turns to the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante for guidance, but also for company as she tries to forge ‘a life of [her] own’. The book represents Biggs’s attempt to convert this reading journey into something that might benefit others, too. It is her contention that, contrary to the ‘message passed down to [her] at Oxford’ that a ‘proper critic’ writes from a position of learned authority, literary criticism ought to be much more like a ‘conversation’; an exchange between readers who want to be ‘transformed’ by the books they read.
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