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British Literature Survey
Reference Pages: Virginia Woolf Group
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Virginia
Woolf's Sketches of the Past (1939)
by Allen Bell
Woolf’s Sketches of the Past is
an autobiographical essay written in the last years of her life. She began
writing it in 1939 and the
final entry is dated November 17th, 1940, four months before her suicide (Hussey
257, King 622). In it, Woolf directly discusses events from her life while
addressing problems in the writing of biography or autobiography. The discussion
of past events is interlaced with journal entries from the time of the writing,
and this juxtaposing and fusion of the past with the present is of great thematic
consequence, for the work is in many respects a meta-memoir, or a memoir about
memoirs and the effect of memory upon the present moment. Woolf writes that
is when she felt aware of her past that she was “living most fully in
the present” (Woolf 98).
Other topics Woolf discusses in the essay include her obsession with her mother,
the mistreatment of the women in her family, and the idea of being and non-being
(Woolf 81, 70; King 584). This last topic concerns the way that certain seemingly
arbitrary moments from one’s life stand out in one’s memory forever,
such as a moment when she was young and realized the connection of a flower to
its surrounding soil (Woolf 71).
After WW II ended, there was a decline in Woolf’s popularity that lasted
until the feminist movement resurrected her reputation in the 1970s (Wikipedia).
It was not until this resurgence in Woolf’s popularity that the collection
of essays containing Sketches, Moments of Being, was finally published.
Works Cited
Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf A-Z: The Essential Reference for Her Life
and Writings.
New York: Oxford U.P., 1995.
King, James. Virginia Woolf. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994.
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 1 Feb. 2006
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf#Autobiography
Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London:
Hogarth Press, 1976.
Paul
Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu