Great essayists

[Hartley99]

I’m a big fan of essays. I especially like Aldous Huxley, Robert Graves, George Orwell and Bertrand Russell and have been collecting them for years. I mean their popular essays, written for the general public (I can’t understand a word of Russell’s heavy mathematical philosophy).

I’d like to find some new essayists to try. Does anyone have any recommendations? I especially like literary essays. But I also like more general musings on life. Orwell is a wonderful essayist because he’ll go off on a tangent and write about toads or junk shops or anything else that takes his fancy. I’ve heard good things about Stephen J Gould, though I’ve never read him. I’ve always meant to try Montaigne as well (he pretty much invented the genre after all). Does anyone have an essay collection by Virginia Woolf?

Try the Oxford Book of Essays

Samuel Johnson. There's a little collection of his writings on Shakespeare, "Johnson on Shakespeare".

M.A. Screech's translations of Montaigne are supposed to be excellent, but I'm afraid I haven't read any.

On Virginia Woolf, try looking for the Common Reader, and her slightly longer essays A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. (I have these in one volume, somewhere).

For rather more modern collections, there are several by Rebecca Solnit, who has also written about George Orwell in Orwell's Roses.

There are lots of different Woolf essay collections, and they’re wonderful. I agree with Rebecca Solnit. Joan Didion. Sheila Heti. Susan Sontag. Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self.

Genius and Ink - Woolf's essays for the TLS.

Thanks for the recommendations everyone.

I’m reading Bertrand Russell atm and would urge everyone to try him. People think of him as heavy and dry and academic, but he’s none of those things. His popular essays, written for the general public, are fantastic - witty, sensible, and wise. He has a wonderfully clear style, rather like Orwell (in fact, they’d be hard to tell apart), and there is always an undercurrent of gentle, mocking humour. He was an immensely kind man, with a deep sympathy for others, and it comes through in everything he writes - as does his cheerfulness. His book The Conquest of Happiness is still the best self-help book out there.

I’d also urge people to try C. S. Lewis. We think of him today as a Christian writer, but his literary essays are superb. He was a staggeringly well-read man, and his prose is sublime.

I wish I could find a modern literary essayist as good as Lewis or Huxley. I do love Harold Bloom, and Martin Amis wrote some good essays (his writings on Nabokov and Jane Austen are worth a look). But they both recently died. I’d like a reliable guide to modern literature, someone who doesn’t have an axe to grind. Too many modern critics seem more interested in promoting minority writers, or interpreting books according to Marxist or feminist theory, than in guiding the reader to what is best.

Misogynies by Joan Smith.

Hazlitt. I'll be honest, I haven't read that much but boy could he write.

My dh LOVED Montaigne.

There's a brilliant podcast called Past Present and Future which did a series on The Great Essayists. I think the one that appealed most was James Baldwin - not that I've yet read it.

A Life In Writing Hilary Mantel

High Tide In Tucson Barbara Kingsolver