She uses the term herself in a passage in “Sketch of the Past” on how impossible it is to isolate the individual ‘subject of the memoir’ from the surrounding forces of heredity, environment, society, family and relationships, that hold it like ‘a fish in the stream’. “Reminiscences” and the Memoir Club essays display the subject in dramatic relation to such forces: family mourning as a constraint on natural behaviour, for instance, in “Reminiscences”, or, in “Am I a Snob?”, the effect of English class consciousness and class envy on a left-wing, upper-middle-class intellectual, with an appetite for coronets and a fascination for the landed aristocracy.fn10 “Sketch of the Past” analyses how such forces, or ‘invisible presences’, are to be dealt with by the life-writer. How describe the stream as well as the fish? What should the entry-point be: first childhood memories, or the history of the ancestors? Should the structure of a life follow chronology (as in most biography), or the involuntary, arbitrary action of memory? How, if at all, can the writing ‘I’ access the ‘I’ in the story? And, given the inhibitions and anxieties of most women who write their autobiographies, how much gets left out?

Woolf speaks movingly in “Sketch of the Past” of her belief that the intense experiences of the past ‘have an existence independent of our minds’. If we could only invent a way of tapping them, we would be able to ‘listen in to the past’: ‘I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start’. Her way of doing this is by the most vivid possible process of ‘scene-making’. All these essays, not just “Sketch”, are full of brilliantly dramatised scenes, which range in mood from sharp comedy to violent despair and grief: Lytton Strachey pointing at the stain on Vanessa’s dress with the one word ‘Semen?’, thereby unleashing ‘a flood of the sacred fluid’ into hitherto repressed Bloomsbury conversation; Lady Sibyl Colefax hiding in the empty drawing room of Argyll House while her furniture is being auctioned; Julia Stephen clapping her hands, with a little spring forward, when she comes to the place in the street where Little Holland House, enchanted house of her youth, once stood; Leslie Stephen thumping his fist and shouting at his daughters over the weekly bills; the sisters sitting in the hot grass in Kensington Gardens reading poetry, after their mother’s death.

But this powerful scene-making is always doing battle against some resistance. That last scene, in which Virginia awkwardly tries to explain to her sister a sudden sense of intensified perception, and can’t find words to do so, is a moment of failed communication in the past, matched by an inability to find the right words for it in the present: ‘Nor does that give the feeling.’ And that memory is of a time when none of them were able to speak out truthfully during the ‘muffled dulness’ after their mother’s death: ‘A finger seemed laid on one’s lips.’ A great deal of this eloquent book is about inhibition, evasion and silence. The story of the move from Kensington to Bloomsbury, from childhood to adulthood, is of moving from censorship and secrecy to candour and free speech. (It’s also about the relief of substituting irony for sentiment, and sceptical intellectual discussion for lachrymose emotions.) She often remarks on how ‘reserved’ she and Thoby were, or how shy Vanessa was about herself, or how liable she herself is to embarrassment and shame. And she still finds it difficult to tell her story – snared, perhaps, by that embarrassment, and by that critical self-consciousness about sentiment. A great deal isn’t spoken of, or is hardly mentioned, in these autobiographies – her breakdowns, her brother Adrian, the death of Thoby, her beginnings as a writer, her friendships with women – and they break off before we find out anything about Leonard or her married life.

“Reminiscences” starts with an inability to speak (‘I can say nothing of that time’), and is full of negatives and refusals: the children refusing to answer Leslie’s call, Julia never speaking about her first love, Leslie tortured by the thought that he never told Julia that he loved her, Julia not telling Stella she was ill, Stella hiding her grief in ‘ordinary words’, Vanessa’s dumbness – ‘she stood before him like a stone’ – in the face of Leslie’s bullying. And the narrative keeps shying away from its real subject, Vanessa, as if it’s almost impossible to write her. The Memoir Club essays expose a history of censorship and silences with gleeful candour, yet, at the same time, with tantalising evasiveness (notably on sexual matters). And “Sketch” is as much about the challenge of writing autobiography as it is about the past. It begins, insistently, with ‘difficulties’, it digresses and deviates and keeps breaking off, it tries out all kinds of metaphors for the past, and it constantly tries to speak the unspeakable: ‘I could spend hours trying to write that as it should be written’ . . . ‘I cannot describe that rapture’ . . . ‘I do not suppose that I have got at the truth’ . . . ‘The word is not the right one – but I cannot find one that is.’ Characteristically, this is a daringly experimental new kind of life-writing, in which the process, with all its problems, becomes part of the story.

The problems tangle up most densely around the figure of Virginia Woolf’s long-dead mother, whose character, influence and death have already been returned to over and over again in fiction and diary entries and letters, in an attempt to exorcise and lay to rest this powerful ghost. Every time Woolf describes Julia Stephen she says she can’t do it, whether in the choked-up, formal rhetoric of “Reminiscences” – ‘you will not find in what I say . . . any semblance of a woman whom you can love’ – or in the complex investigation, in “Sketch”, of ‘why I find it now so curiously difficult to describe both my feeling for her, and her herself’. She can never come to a conclusion, as she so badly wanted to do in her novels: ‘For there she was’ (Mrs Dalloway); ‘I have had my vision’ (To the Lighthouse); ‘That’s done it’ (Between the Acts). The death of the mother, that she found so hard to deal with in the novels – as a silent gap in The Voyage Out, in unbearable brackets in To the Lighthouse, coldly distanced in The Years – can never be settled.