Moments of Being

Published years after her death, Moments of Being is Virginia Woolf’s only autobiographical writing, considered by many to be her most important book.

In “Reminiscences,” the first of five pieces included in Moments of Being, Woolf focuses on the death of her mother, “the greatest disaster that could happen,” and its effect on her father, a demanding Victorian patriarch who played a crucial role in her development as an individual and a writer. Three of the essays she wrote for the purpose of reading at the Memoir Club, a postwar regrouping of Bloomsbury, and “A Sketch of the Past” the last and longest of the five essays, gives an account of Woolf's early years in her family's household at 22 Hyde Park Gate.