Virginia Woolf’s only autobiographical writing, outside her diaries and letters, is to be found in this collection of five pieces. Despite many biographies and studies of her, the author’s own account of her early life holds tremendous fascination – for its unexpected detail, the strength of its emotion, and its clear-sighted judgement of Victorian values.

In ‘Reminiscences’ Virginia Woolf focuses on her mother’s death, ‘the greatest disaster that could happen’, and its effect on her father, the demanding patriarch who took a high toll of the women in his household. She surveys some of the same ground in ‘Sketch of the Past’, the most important memoir in this collection, which she wrote with deep feeling and supreme command of her art shortly before her own death. Readers will be struck by the extent to which she drew on these early experiences for her novels, as she tells how she exorcised the haunting presence of her mother by writing To the Lighthouse.

The other three essays were composed to be read to the Memoir Club, a postwar regrouping of Bloomsbury, which exacted absolute candour of its members. Virginia Woolf’s contributions were not only bold but also original and amusing. She describes George Duckworth’s uncomfortable relations with his half-sisters, the Stephen girls; gives her own version of ‘Old Bloomsbury’; and, with wit and some malice, reflects on her connections with titled society.

About the Author

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography, and of his second wife, Julia Stephen. Her sister was the painter Vanessa Bell. From 1915, when she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays, letters, diaries and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 they founded The Hogarth Press.

Virginia Woolf had a series of mental breakdowns in her childhood and early adulthood, and on 28 March 1941 she committed suicide.

Jeanne Schulkind taught English Literature at the University of Sussex, where she completed a doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf, and she gave courses and lectures on Virginia Woolf for the University of London. Her interest in the Bloomsbury Group led her to the Courtauld Institute, where her studies included the art of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. She then taught History of Art at St Paul’s Girls’ School, London.

Hermione Lee grew up in London and was educated there and at Oxford. She taught at the Universities of Liverpool and York, and is now the first woman Goldsmiths’ Professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is well-known as a writer, reviewer and broadcaster. Her books include a critical study of the novels of Virginia Woolf, a book on the writing of Elizabeth Bowen and a critical biography of Willa Cather. Her biography Virginia Woolf received international acclaim, has been translated into French, German and Korean, and won the 1997 British Academy Rose Crawshay Award.

MOMENTS OF BEING

VIRGINIA WOOLF

New Edition

Edited by Jeanne Schulkind

Introduced and revised by Hermione Lee

Introduction

“MOMENTS OF BEING” was not Virginia Woolf’s title for this book, nor did she put together these five autobiographical essays, written over a thirty-three-year span, and none of them published in her lifetime. The phrase occurs in the last and longest of these autobiographical pieces, which Woolf called “Sketch of the Past”. It’s taken from the passage early on in the “Sketch” where she says that life seems to her to be divided between a great deal of ordinary, unimpressive, routine activity – what she calls ‘cotton wool, or non-being’ – and sudden violent shocks, ‘exceptional moments’, which function as a form of ‘revelation’. That leads her on to her ‘conception’ of writing, and her rather mysterious philosophy of life, ‘that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern’ and that all human beings are part of this universal ‘work of art’, which specific artists – Shakespeare, or Beethoven – may give expression to, but to which we all contribute: ‘We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.’

Jeanne Schulkind, who first transcribed and edited these autobiographical pieces in 1976, chose the title to emphasise Woolf’s alternation between two levels of being. Schulkind saw that as the link between the autobiography and the fiction, which she read as quests towards ‘moments of being’ when the physical, social self is transcended and ‘the individual consciousness becomes an undifferentiated part of a greater whole’.fn1 She drew a comparison between the “Sketch” and Woolf’s essay on De Quincey, where Woolf says: ‘To tell the whole story of a life the autobiographer must devise some means by which the two levels of existence can be recorded – the rapid passage of events and actions; the slow opening up of single and solemn moments of concentrated emotion.’ (And Schulkind may also have been thinking of Woolf’s 1928 essay on Hardy, where she borrows Hardy’s title ‘moments of vision’ to describe the ‘sudden quickening of power’ in his novels when ‘a single scene breaks off from the rest’.)fn2

The title “Moments of Being” sums up very well the intense emotions, the shocks, the rushes of involuntary memory that “Sketch of the Past” is so much concerned with. But it feeds exclusively into the interiorised, sensitive, aesthetic, even mystical side of Woolf’s posthumous reputation. There are many other aspects to this collection – social comedy, ruthless self-analysis, elegy, satire, family plot, caricature, autobiographical theory – which “Moments of Being” doesn’t cover. The volume might have carried different associations if its title had been (to take some of the other phrases from these essays) “Am I a Snob?”, “Writing my Memoirs”, or “Good God! Here I am again!”

And the whole history of this volume has been an odd one. If five autobiographical essays by (say) Joyce, or Lawrence, or Eliot, unpublished in their lifetime, and containing sensational new material about their childhood and family life, had been posthumously published, a tremendous fuss would have been made of it. But Woolf’s reputation in this country has always been extremely mixed. When Moments of Being first came out, published by a small university press, and again when it was reissued by The Hogarth Press in 1985, with a very significant seventy-page typescript version of the “Sketch” added in, no great stir was caused. And while the arguments over Woolf boiled on in the ’80s and ’90s – feminist heroine, child-abuse victim, Bloomsbury snob, modernist genius? – this volume fell quietly, and lamentably, out of print. Yet it is of the utmost importance for anyone interested in Woolf – or in autobiography, or in women’s lives, or in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century English society. It makes an absorbing, dramatic narrative, tragic, funny, historically rich, and profoundly revealing. It is an indispensable tool for her biographers and critics; it has changed the way her life story is read, and it throws a strong illuminating light on her fiction.

Alongside the developing interest in, and the professional editing of, Woolf’s many different kinds of overlapping, genre-busting writings – essays, letters, diaries – these autobiographies have come to seem more and more central and important. And they are just the sort of writing she was most interested in herself.

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MY ACCOUNT

Moments of Being Read Online

Contents

About the Book

About the Author

MOMENTS OF BEING

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Introduction

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