To hear some essayists characterize their relationship with reading, one could be forgiven for believing that they were describing a fraught connection with a best friend, lover, mentor, terrible bully … or maybe God. While essayists avail themselves of an infinite variety of materials to read, with a few notable exceptions, they are more likely to enact or demonstrate the power of their reading practice than to theorize it, even though theorizing and reading are inherently essayistic activities. Turn the onionskin pages of an old dictionary to reveal that the word ‘theory’ draws from the Ancient Greek θεωρός (theōros), ‘spectator’, while the word ‘read’ has etymological filaments that reach to Old Frisian (rēda) ‘to advise, to deliberate, to help’, Early Irish (ráidid) ‘says, speaks’, and Old Church Slavonic (raditi) ‘to attend to, to take care of (a thing)’. Reading in an essay can take on all of these dispositions, and many others, of course.

This chapter argues that the act of reading animates essays, regardless of their subject matter. Essayists exemplify the practices and principles of what Ralph Waldo Emerson has called ‘creative reading’. Creative reading is not a singular activity, but the term describes the reciprocal nature of reading and writing in essays, a dynamic theorized by Theodor W. Adorno and Graham Good. Literacy scholars such as Louise Rosenblatt highlight how readers in essays and readers of essays are responsible for and capable of creative experiences when reading, but trouble how reading expectations in school often obstruct students’ paths to those experiences. Virginia Woolf describes the conditions most fruitful for how readers can have the aesthetic, creative encounters that Rosenblatt, Good and Adorno envision. When readers and writers frame their ideas, values, discourse and style to resist injustices they encounter in a dominant view they participate in (and sometimes instantiate) a ‘counterpublic’, in Nancy Fraser’s and Michael Warner’s terms. The political essay in all of its guises – from Frederick Douglass’s speech ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ (1852) to Rebecca Solnit’s ‘The Slow Road to Sudden Change’ (2020) – is an act of reading in which writers accept their responsibility to address injustice, however imperfectly, and give others the means and reasons to do so.