Claire Messud: Revisiting Virginia Woolf's Essays in The Yale Review

There’s always an imaginary other, a “model reader” (to use Umberto Eco’s useful expression) who’s there in the corner of your mind. To write a novel or a poem, they say, you need to have a sense of a reader: your mental picture doesn’t have to be exact or personalized, but no work exists without an imaginary third participant. There’s always you,

... See more