For readers and researchers of modernist literature, the name Virginia Woolf conjures images of stream-of-consciousness novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse . However, one of her most intimate and revealing works is not a novel at all, but a memoir: Written in 1939-1940 and published posthumously, this text offers an unparalleled window into Woolf’s mind, her childhood, and her very theory of memory.
Perhaps the most compelling reason to download A Sketch of the Past is to witness the birth of the modernist sensibility. Woolf does not write a chronological list of dates and achievements. Instead, she attempts to capture the "moth-like" quality of memory. She writes of looking at a flower in a garden at St. Ives and feeling a "party in the brain." She tries to explain how a writer is made—not by universities, but by the "shocks" of life that require an envelope of words to contain them. virginia woolf a sketch of the past pdf
The "cotton wool" of daily life—the mundane, unconscious routine of eating, walking, and performing tasks that leave no lasting impression. For readers and researchers of modernist literature, the