Moments of Being
Virginia Woolf
Thus she begins her serious literary career as an autobiographer; and it may be said that she ends her literary career as an autobiographer as well, for during the last year and a half of her life she wrote ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ covering exactly the same experiences rehearsed 32 years before in the ‘Reminiscences.’ As an autobiographer, then, her principal concern is childhood: she draws her literary energies from her mythopoeia of her youth and refuses to face death until she has given her youth a more satisfying verbal form. D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce also wrote autobiographies, thinly disguised accounts of their development, soon after they became writers, but they did not share Virginia Woolf’s abiding obsession with autobiography; it is as if Lawrence and Joyce, in Sons and Lovers and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, got it right the first time, while Virginia Woolf was left with a lifelong intractable struggle with the infantile.
As a young woman she tried on several occasions to keep a diary, but this resolution did not stick until 1915 when she began the enormous set of daybooks which she kept up more or less continually until her death in 1941. In the opinion of many, this project is one of the masterworks of modern letters. In many places in her diary she announces that her purpose is to provide material for her memoirs, to be written by an elderly Virginia Woolf, an alter ego often addressed in the diary as a presiding dowager queen. Of course when she did come to write her memoirs, in 1939, she abandoned herself at about the age of 21, as if the adult Virginia Woolf were in no need of literary recall. However, the diary itself constitutes a kind of autobiography, though an autobiography of an oddly loquacious, yet oddly reticent sort.
Therefore we have two elaborately shaped narratives of childhood, both of them concocted with every literary resource, neither of which extends so far as her father’s death in 1904; an astonishingly replete record of the years of her full maturity, 1915-1941 (except for 1916, a year of illness); and, to cover the gaps, three papers which she wrote for the Memoir Club of Bloomsbury, the first two of which describe the quality of her life from late adolescence until 1912.
But of her marriage to Leonard Woolf, in 1912, she has scarcely a word to say anywhere. Indeed the period from 1907, when she began her first novel, The Voyage Out, until the beginning of the first World War, seems to have required almost no self-explanation. All the autobiographical writings I have mentioned, except the diary, are collected in a handy volume called Moments of Being; these writings, with the diary and the novel, To the Lighthouse, constitute Virginia Woolf’s attempt to elucidate her being. ~ Daniel Albright, portion taken from The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Autumn, 1984)
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Details
| ISBN | 9780586073261 |
| Genre | Autobiography/Biography; Grier Rated |
| Publication Date | 1989 |
| Publisher | Grafton Books |
| No. of Pages | 249 |
| LoC Classification | PR6045 .O72 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | Great |
| Subject | Authors, English; Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Novelists, English; Novelists, English – 20th Century – Biography; Woolf, Virginia |
| BookID | 8401 |
