She loved reading – and writing – ‘lives of the obscure’; she had a passion for marginal, undervalued literary forms like journals and memoirs. She was preoccupied, all through her writing life, with how a woman might write her own life story, when there were so few historical precedents and so little encouragement. How would a woman’s writing of her life be different from a man’s? Why were there no female autobiographers like Rousseau? Why were women, on the whole, inhibited and self-censoring? She was always writing to her women friends telling them to write their autobiographies. ‘Very few women yet have written truthful autobiographies. It is my favourite form of reading.’ ‘There’s never been a woman’s autobiography. Nothing to compare with Rousseau. Chastity and modesty I suppose have been the reason.’fn3 In her feminist essays, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, she thinks hard, and painfully, about the representation of women’s lives. Her fiction returned over and over again to the telling of a woman’s life story, from Rachel Vinrace in her first novel The Voyage Out, trying to describe how she spent her days to the young novelist Terence Hewet, to the imagining of the secret interior lives of Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay, to the liberating fantasy-life of Orlando, and last to Isa’s private unutterable thoughts, hidden in a notebook disguised as an account book, in Between the Acts, the novel Woolf was writing at the same time as her own unfinished autobiography.

Her own experiments in memoir writing are startlingly candid – up to a point. These essays give vivid, explicit accounts of some parts of Virginia Woolf’s life. Here is the story of the Stephen family, its ancestry, its class, its social context, down to every tiny, telling detail of the fixtures and fittings – the biscuit tin shaped like a barrel in the dining room, the silver salver deep in visiting cards on the hall table, the stained pattern of leaves on her half-sister’s writing table. She builds in, stroke by stroke and brick by brick, a whole architecture of houses, rooms, landscapes and habits, within which she places the personal stories. And though these stories overlap, recur and fragment, they can be itemised, like chapter headings or scenes in a play: The characters of her parents. The shocks and sensations of early childhood. The split between St Ives and Hyde Park Gate. The uncomfortable relations between the Stephen and the Duckworth children. The tragedy of Julia Stephen’s early death and of Leslie Stephen’s terrible grieving, which turned his children against him. His tyrannising over a succession of women – Julia, her daughter Stella, Vanessa, Virginia. The children’s resistance. Stella’s shocking early death. The claustrophobic lives of the teenage Vanessa and Virginia. The suffocating, aggressive, over-intimate demands of their half-brother George Duckworth. The characters of Thoby and Vanessa. Virginia’s breakdown after her father’s death. The move from Kensington to Bloomsbury. The growing intimacy with Thoby’s young Cambridge male friends, which became ‘Bloomsbury’. The change in decor, freedoms, behaviour, family relations, above all in conversation. And framing, or filtering into, these narratives of the past, there are passages about the present: the memoir club; her relations to high society; her life in wartime; her writing of these autobiographies.

These autobiographies – especially “Sketch of the Past” and “22 Hyde Park Gate” – have been made use of for very different – sometimes competing – accounts of Virginia Woolf’s life and writing. Her memories and stories of being touched and fondled by her half-brothers, told here in detail for the first time (though there are some comic, evasive references to George Duckworth’s behaviour in her letters) provide crucial evidence for the version of her life which explains her as the victim of childhood sexual abuse. In particular, two pages of “Sketch” are repeatedly singled out for intensive analysis, where she is explaining her ‘looking-glass shame’ by drawing on a memory of Gerald Duckworth exploring her body, when she was very young, linked to a dream of a ‘horrible face’ looking over her shoulder in the glass. Psychoanalytical readings of these passages apply Freud’s idea of the screening of unconscious memories, or Lacan’s theory of the ‘mirror-stage’ of psychic development, when the child begins to structure an identity through awareness of division and separation.