She describes it three times in her diaries, three times in these memoirs, always slightly differently.fn11 The repetitive, inconclusive return to the mother’s death is at the heart of this remarkable adventure in life-writing, where the past can never be solved or tidied away, the subject can never be finished with. As she said of her mother in “Reminiscences”, in a haunting phrase that balanced the absence of the dead against the presence of memory and narrative: ‘Where has she gone? What she said has never ceased.’

Hermione Lee
2002

fn1 Jeanne Schulkind, “Introduction”, Moments of Being, 1985, p. 18.

fn2 “De Quincey’s Autobiography”, The Second Common Reader, The Hogarth Press, 1932; “Thomas Hardy’s Novels”, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. A. McNeillie, The Hogarth Press, 1994, Vol. IV, p. 509.

fn3 VW to Victoria Ocampo, 22 Dec 1934; VW to Ethel Smyth, 24 Dec 1940, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann, The Hogarth Press, 1975–80, Vol. V, p. 356, Vol. VI, p. 453.

fn4 Sue Roe, Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf’s Writing Practice, Harvester, 1990, pp. 43, 45. See also Francois Defromont, “Mirrors and Fragments” in Rachel Bowlby, ed., Virginia Woolf, Longmans, 1992; Daniel Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, Routledge, 1990, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby; Shari Benstock, “Authorizing the Autobiographical” in The Private Self, Routledge, 1988, for Lacanian/Freudian readings of Moments of Being.

fn5 Barbara Claire Freeman, “Moments of Beating”, Diacritics, 27: 3 (Fall 1997), p. 69; Ferrer, pp. 27, 46; Roe, p. 68.

fn6 See Linda Anderson, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, Harvester, 1997, p. 74; Benstock, pp. 25–29; Roe, p. 57.

fn7 Kennedy Fraser, Ornament and Silence, 1996, 109; Sidonie Smith, “Identity’s Body”, in Autobiography & PostModernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley et al, University of Massachusetts, 1994, p. 277.

fn8 See Christopher Dahl, “Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being and Autobiographical Tradition in the Stephen Family”, Journal of Modem Literature, June 1983, Vol. 10, no. 2; pp. 175–96.

fn9 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Vol. II, p.