What is an essay? For most people the word conjures up memories of the things you were forced to write at school by people like Miss Peecher the teacher, in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, whose essays were "always according to rule". Yet in fact the essay is one of the least rule-bound forms in literary history, a genre that can encompass everything from the 600 pages of systematic philosophy in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding to the handful of paragraphs which make up GK Chesterton's freewheeling mini-masterpiece, A Piece of Chalk.
Ben Jonson may have dismissed the essay as "a few loose paragraphs and that's all", but its history shows it to have been the most elastic of forms, able to incorporate all sorts of prose – and indeed, in the case of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, poetry. For the Viennese modernist Robert Musil, Essayismus was much more than a literary form: it was both a philosophy of life and an epistemology; a way of making provisional sense of experience in a fragmentary world. Zadie Smith pointed to something similar when – in a Guardian article in 2009 – she called the essay the prose form which can best reflect "messy reality".
Though the essay constantly resists definition – and has never accrued a corpus of academic critical commentary like that given to, say, the novel - it is unusual among literary forms in that its birth can be traced to a single moment and a single man: Montaigne, whose Essaies first appeared in 1580, arguably heralding the birth of the modern idea of the author as subject (in both senses). The word meant, literally, an "assay", a trail or test or even "experiment". Whatever Miss Peecher may have thought, the essay has, over its history, remained a defiantly individual form, a space outside institutional authority or generic constraints.
Montaigne used the essay as an arena in which to observe his own mind at work. The great Romantic essayists – Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Carlyle – used it to assert the value of the individual human voice in a world increasingly felt to be dominated by "abstraction". For Emerson the essay was "man thinking". Wilde and Beerbohm used it to subvert conventional values, while for Orwell – whose essays in Tribune appeared under the banner "As I Please" – it embodied his own rigorous anti-authoritarianism. The essay is the ultimate outsider genre. If it is making a comeback, it may be that, in our age of information overload, there is a hunger among readers for the individual voice.
