‘On Not Knowing French’ is a fascinating review which marked Virginia Woolf's official debut in France as a ‘femme de lettres’. Published in French on the front page of Le Figaro on 10 February 1929, three days before publication in Britain, it was a commissioned contribution which followed her being awarded the ‘Prix Femina – Vie Heureuse’ for To the Lighthouse the year before. It was Woolf's first opportunity to address an eminent French readership, demanding a theme, voice and mode of address suited to the occasion. Her essay's explicit purpose is to review Climats, a new novel by the French author, biographer, translator and staunch Anglophile André Maurois, who was then enjoying a successful literary career on both sides of the Channel. Rather than tackling the topic head on, however, the reviewer begins by reflecting on what reading and being read in translation, either side of the Channel, might mean. The opening gambit runs as follows:

It is an elegantly framed, somewhat deferential preliminary statement, paying homage to a form of ‘exception culturelle française’ – a national birthright bestowing linguistic finesse, Cartesian rationality and chic refinement on the French native speaker. However much one may aspire to proficiency in the French language, or savour their literature, Woolf seems to concede, one is doomed to fall short: there is no hope of attaining native competence.