It’s argued that Woolf is ‘trying to tell the truth about the body’ in these essays by ‘tapping the unconscious mind for memories which the conscious mind has screened’.fn4 Whether Woolf has been screening out, and is now trying to access, ‘forced exposure, masturbation, and/or penetration of the female genitals’, or ‘the primal scene of parental sex’, or the trauma of the mother’s death, or the ‘pre-Oedipal moments of oneness with her mother’s body’, psychoanalytical approaches all emphasise a process of repression and an experience of trauma.fn5 But there is a division between readers who see these autobiographies as evidence of psychic disability, or as powerful expressions of political anger. Some read “Sketch”, in particular, as a narrative of displacement and fragmentation, where representation is always under threat, the self is passive or absent, and the text is full of gaps and deferrals: as if the whole process of this writing was tending towards breakdown.fn6 Other more realist readers see these memoirs as angrily ‘showing the injustice of patriarchal domination’, and ‘the social construction of sexual difference within the bourgeois Victorian household’.fn7

So Woolf’s memoirs have become an arena for debate in feminist theory. But problems arise from treating Moments of Being as a whole, unified piece of evidence about Woolf’s inner life, or as a continuous narrative to be mined for factual information and links to the novels. This is a peculiar, fragmentary book, whose five essays tell an overlapping story in different ways, with different motives, and over a long period of time. “Reminiscences”, written in 1907 and 1908, is addressed to her sister Vanessa’s first child, Julian Bell, and was begun before his birth. It sets itself in the long-running Stephen family tradition of memoirs written for the next generation – like Leslie Stephen’s anguished memories of Julia, known by his children as the ‘Mausoleum Book’.fn8 It is written out of Virginia’s equally intense feelings about Vanessa, who had married Clive Bell in 1907 – jealousy, competitiveness, bereavement, a sense of having been displaced. Its motive is to reclaim Vanessa as her own. It is a literary exercise (being written at the same time as her drafting and redrafting of her first novel), which mixes her emotions for her sister with the story of their parents, her own childhood, the deaths of Julia and Stella, and Vanessa’s situation in the family after Stella’s death. Though it reads formally and conventionally, almost as a pastiche of a family memoir, and though there are many things it can’t or won’t mention, it is also an experimental piece of writing, a mixture of autobiography, memoir and love letter.

Utterly different in tone are the three pieces written to be read to the ‘Memoir Club’, two from the early 1920s and one from 1936. The Memoir Club was founded by Molly MacCarthy in 1920 as a post-war regrouping of the network of friends which came out of Cambridge in the 1900s and became known as the Bloomsbury Group. The idea was for an autobiographical paper to be read by one or two of the group at each meeting. In her Diary for 18 March 1920, Virginia Woolf expressed deep mortification at having ‘laid her soul bare’ to the Club, with a ‘chapter’ that was greeted at first with ‘loud laughter’ and then with ‘uncomfortable boredom’ from the male members of the audience. ‘Oh but why did I read this egotistical sentimental trash!’fn9 Whatever this ‘chapter’ was – and it doesn’t survive – she had embarrassed herself by its candour and emotion. On 5 December 1920, however, she reports having been ‘fearfully brilliant’ at the Club, and a few months later on being congratulated by Maynard Keynes for her ‘Memoir on George’. Clearly she had decided, after her earlier discomfiture, to give her memoirs of the family home, the doings of George and the beginnings of Bloomsbury, as entertainment rather than confession. There is plenty of dark material in these essays, but the tone is jaunty, comical and ruthless. In the first few paragraphs, we get a family idiot, a woman who has poisoned her husband by mistake, an old man who spouts tea and sultanas through his nostrils, and a son who has been eaten by a shark. Woolf was famous for her conversation and her letters, sparkling with caricature and anecdotes. These essays live up to her reputation: they make an ironic, colourful, conversational performance out of the difficult past. The naughty French farce she is taken to by mistake at eighteen lends its tone of high jinks and sexual bravado to these essays, which are full of ridiculous scenes – the bizarre vision of Holman Hunt, the gloomy first appearance of Thoby’s young Cambridge friends, the backstage scenes of squalor and disarray at Lady Sibyl Colefax’s once-grand house. This comic dramatising of her life allows for mixed motives to have play – part nostalgia (‘Old Bloomsbury’ called up the ghost of Thoby Stephen), part competitiveness (her private life is set against the fame of Maynard Keynes or Lytton Strachey), part revenge (her successful middle-aged audience are reminded of themselves as boring, self-absorbed young men), part self-criticism (she is quite as sharp about her own snobbery as any of her critics can be) and part self-defence.

To turn from the Memoir Club essays to the “Sketch of the Past” is like turning from her letters to her diaries – or her novels. “Sketch” begins what might have been a full-scale autobiography, had she lived. (She had begun to revise it and to type it up, as if working on a novel.) It was written in fits and starts, from April to July 1939 and then from June to November 1940. It was structured, not by chapters, but by dates, using the present ‘as a platform’ from which to view the past, moving between May 1895 and May 1939, or June 1940 and July 1897. The exercise was partly ‘by way of a holiday from Roger’: as an antidote to the ‘drudgery’ of writing her biography of Roger Fry, which she had begun, at the request of his widow, in 1938, and was revising through 1939, finding it a ‘grind’, frustrated by the need for discretion, the tyranny of chronology, and the clash between ‘facts’ and ‘vision’. Many years of thinking about the limitations of biography – which had already produced Orlando, a dazzling biographical spoof – underlay this see-saw between her writing of an ‘official’ Life and a private life story.

She was reading Freud for the first time, whose ideas on regression, ambivalence and the unconscious disturbingly coloured this retelling of her childhood. The “Sketch” coincided, too, with the writing of Between the Acts, much concerned with the painful gaps between social masks and secret selves, and with a story called “The Searchlight”, in which a woman in wartime London turns the searchlight or telescope of memory back onto a Victorian past. This woman is like Virginia Woolf, returning to St Ives in the 1880s as a consolatory, even therapeutic, escape from dark days: air raids, plans for suicide in case of invasion, the fall of France. “Sketch of the Past” is about how memory works and how autobiography – particularly a woman’s autobiography – is written. And it makes a searching description of herself as a writer: her impulses, her ‘conception’, her materials (some of which is returned here from fictional to autobiographical use, like the puddle Rhoda couldn’t cross in The Waves, or the marriage of the Ramsays in To the Lighthouse), her struggles and her satisfactions.

So Moments of Being is an evolving narrative about the process of ‘life-writing’.