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In praise of … the essay

This article is more than 12 years old
Editorial
Michel de Montaigne crafted a personal and conversational genre which has been the preferred literary mode of free spirits

With their exams looming, Britain's school and university students are probably more likely to curse the essay than to celebrate it. And with academic tomes getting ever longer while tweets gets ever pithier, the essay may seem like a bit of a relic to many others too – a bit like county cricket squeezed between tests and Twenty 20. Yet it is hard to think of a more modern mentality than that of the man who practically invented the essay nearly half a millennium ago and whose popularity today has rarely been greater, thanks not least to the recent bestseller by Sarah Bakewell. Michel de Montaigne established the essay as a form into which the provisional and the questioning were written from the start. He wrote about the momentary and the accidental, even the banal, rather than the all-encompassing. In doing so he crafted an intensely personal and conversational genre which has been the preferred literary mode of free spirits from Addison to Žižek and Hazlitt to Hitchens. The best essays, like George Orwell's, are tough but not fanatical, delight in the commonplace and ambiguous and can see the world as easily in a ham sandwich as a morning rose. The imminent launch of a new publishing imprint, Notting Hill Editions, specifically devoted to reviving the essay, may be a sign of unmet demand for wise and witty individual voices amid the modern Babel. Exam candidates may long to see the end of the essay. Many others of us, less immediately pressured, would be happy for more of them.

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