Autobiographical Fragments: Virginia Woolf's Sketch of the Past

By Urmila Seshagiri, NYPL Short-Term Fellow
August 3, 2022
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

This post was written by Urmila Seshagiri. Seshagiri is Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of Tennessee and the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2010) and the editor of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 2022). She is preparing the first scholarly edition of Woolf’s memoir, Sketch of the Past and a Norton Library edition of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Mysteries envelop Virginia Woolf’s memoir, Sketch of the Past (1939-41), a stunning, radically experimental work composed in secret during the Blitz and unknown for decades after its author’s death. Although Woolf’s memoir holds a commanding role in scholarship about her life and art, the story of its composition, discovery, and publication remains untold. These are rare blank spaces in the life of an author whose hour-by-hour doings, it seems, have been mapped in their entirety. When did Virginia Woolf decide to write her autobiography? Did she tell anyone she had begun the project? Are her working drafts incomplete because Woolf died before she could revise them, or does their unfinishedness suggest a new artistic direction? And why did 35 years pass before Sketch of the Past was made available to readers? As I hunted for answers during an NYPL Short-Term Fellowship in December 2021, poring over Woolf’s meticulously archived manuscripts, letters, drafts, and typescripts in the sacred hush of the Berg Reading Room, I recalled Woolf’s words about writing memoirs: it is "a great delight to put the severed parts together." I was thrilled to uncover a history whose elements had been disjoined, suppressed, lost, or deemed unimportant.

"Old Bloomsbury"

"Old Bloomsbury" typescript draft by Virginia Woolf.

Copyright © Estate of Virginia Woolf, courtesy of Estate of Virginia Woolf / Society of Authors

The lengthiest portions of Sketch of the Past are housed in the Monks House Papers at the University of Sussex and in the British Library, but the Berg Collection holds several documents essential for understanding Woolf’s memoir. Two items became especially significant for my research: a damaged single-page typescript from Woolf’s 1928 piece “Old Bloomsbury;" and a densely-written 8-page draft portion of Sketch of the Past. Both of these items are catalogued in the finding aid as "Autobiographical fragments," a designation wonderfully resonant with the discontinuous, fragmented form of Sketch of the Past and its thirteen diary-like sections. As I studied the worn, translucent page from "Old Bloomsbury," a high-spirited piece Woolf delivered to the Bloomsbury Memoir Club (a storied group of friends, rivals, and lovers whose members included Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell, Molly and Desmond MacCarthy, and, of course, the Woolfs), I wondered if Sketch of the Past had been read at a Memoir Club meeting during or after Woolf’s life.

Nothing in Woolf’s correspondence or her diaries indicates that she disclosed the memoir’s existence while writing it, even though she freely discussed other works-in-progress, such as her 10th novel Between the Acts and her biography, Roger Fry. To trace the unpublished records of the Bloomsbury Memoir Club, I realized, I would have to connect the Berg’s holdings with materials from other archives. With the guidance of the Berg’s curator Carolyn Vega and of archivists in the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Sussex, and King’s College, Cambridge University, I "put together the severed parts" of a hitherto unknown story. The small, vital chronology I reconstructed furnishes new contexts about how readers first encountered Sketch of the Past. Further, it lays bare the knife-edge between art and life that always attends modernist literary experiments.

Eight years after Woolf’s death, Leonard Woolf loaned his wife’s multi-stage drafts of Sketch of the Past to Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell. Vanessa shared Sketch during a Memoir Club meeting in May 1949, reading her sister’s autobiography aloud to a rapt audience of friends until the clock struck midnight. But in subsequent published records of this occasion, Vanessa—as well as the Memoir Club’s then-Secretary Frances Partridge—excised or greatly compressed evidence of Woolf’s memoir. Sketch of the Past would remain hidden until 1976, when Jeanne Schulkind, the scholar who curated the Monks House Papers in Sussex, published it in a collection titled Moments of Being. Although Woolf self-consciously frames her memoir’s intimate revelations in philosophical terms—a framing whose majesty would compel the New York Times to pronounce Sketch "the single most moving and beautiful thing that Virginia Woolf ever wrote"—her innermost circle deemed the work too private for strangers’ eyes. The memoir’s initial impact, thus, illustrates one of Woolf’s longstanding preoccupations, which she articulated in an article for The Atlantic written just as she embarked on Sketch and whose typescript is in the Berg Collection: "The art of biography we say— but at once go on to ask, is biography an art?"

Art of Biography

"The Art of Biography" typescript (carbon) by Virginia Woolf.

Copyright © Estate of Virginia Woolf, courtesy of Estate of Virginia Woolf / Society of Authors

Woolf, of course, regarded biography as one of the highest forms of art, a reverence that shines through the Berg Collection’s 8-page handwritten fragment of Sketch. This fragment (acquired by the Berg prior to Leonard Woolf’s death in 1966 and unintentionally separated from the rest of the drafts of Sketch in Sussex) teaches us about Woolf’s composition and revision process. It begins with the routines of Woolf’s childhood home, 22 Hyde Park Gate ("The tea table was the centre of Victorian family life") and ends with the tragedy of her half-sister Stella’s death in 1897.

"The tea table was the centre of Victorian family life."

"The tea table was the centre of Victorian family life" manuscript by Virginia Woolf.

Copyright © Estate of Virginia Woolf, courtesy of Estate of Virginia Woolf / Society of Authors

The fragment’s last page contains a passage that Woolf reworked significantly in her later typescript. Describing the sorrow that suffused her consciousness in the years after her mother’s death, Woolf writes of the shock of losing her sister so soon after their mother’s death:

BERG MANUSCRIPT: 

All this had toned my mind & made it apprehensive: made it I suppose unnaturally responsive to Stellas happiness & the [relief it (struck through)] promise it held for us and for her – when once more, unbelievably, catastrophically (?) – I remember saying to myself the impossible thing has happened: -- and it was unnatural, against the law, horrible, as a treachery, a betrayal, a – the fact of death. The blow, the second blow of death, struck on me: tremulous, creased sitting with my wings still stuck, together, on the broken chrysalis.

REVISED PASSAGE IN BRITISH LIBRARY TYPESCRIPT: 

All this had toned my mind and made it apprehensive; made it I suppose unnaturally responsive to Stella's happiness, and the promise it held for her and for us of escape from that gloom; when once more unbelievably--incredibly­- as  if  one had been violently  cheated of   some  promise; more than that brutally told not to be such a fool as to hope for things; I remember saying to myself after she died: But this is impossible; things aren't, can't be, like this-- the blow the second blow of death struck on me; tremulous, filmy eyed as I was, with my wings still creased, sitting there on the edge of my broken chrysalis.

The reworked later version transmits the cruelty she felt at being robbed of the two women she loved most. Her typescript's metaphors ("as if one had been violently cheated of some promise; more than that brutally told not to be such a fool as to hope for things") capture a deep, somber outrage that had eluded her in the manuscript ("and it was unnatural, against the law, horrible, as a treachery, a betrayal, a – the fact of death"). And Woolf finds a poetic rhythm for her revised final lines ("-- the blow the second blow of death struck on me; tremulous, filmy eyed as I was, with my wings still creased, sitting there on the edge of my broken chrysalis") that the first draft had not quite realized. This fragment of Sketch of the Past is the only known draft portion of a typescript housed in the British Library, and even the short glimpse into Woolf’s artistic practice establishes how much attention she gave to the style of a memoir that she was supposedly writing on the spur of the moment.