Autobiographical VW

What large eyes you have Virginia Woolf! And how surprising you are! You inspire and stump my creativity; you play to me – the sole member of the audience – and I am captive. Held by the humorous and dark notes of your autobiographical writings, which were not prepared by you for publication (would they have been?); by your statement that: 'I knew theoretically, from books, much more than I knew practically from life.' You however spread your wings; I clipped mine, happier with books than practical knowledge, and anyhow, I'm too old now to gain by it; too disillusioned and too set in my ways. I would not have been made for Old Bloomsbury, the inner or the outer circle. Miss Stephen dared to open her mouth, to attend parties, to append herself to other artists and writers, and become one; and then as Mrs Woolf to break further rules. The writer emerged and confirmed in her art. A writer who when she writes of her past – in fiction or memoir – evokes in this reader at least her own.

Written December 2021.

See Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf (edited by Jeanne Schulkind).

Picture credit: The Memoir Club, 1943, Vanessa Bell (source: WikiArt).