Soft modernism & amateur readers: Reading pleasure, Virginia Woolf, 'Orlando & the Waves

In The Trouble With Beauty, Wendy Steiner notes in passing that Virginia Woolf is an originator of "soft modernism" for, unlike her high modernist contemporaries, Woolf considered pleasure a central affect of reading and an important part of a book's value. Using the concept of soft modernism as a point of departure, I will examine her fiction and non-fiction to show that Woolf demonstrates a commitment to amateur readers and their personal pleasures by imagining a model of androgynous reading that balances the high modernist masculine aesthetic values with their denigrated feminine opposites. I then contrast Woolf's emphasis on pleasure with a scholarly tradition originating in her earliest reviews which relegates pleasure to the periphery of analyses of her writing and thereby refuses to consider her work as she hoped and intended, from the perspective of an amateur or common reader, who reads for pleasure.