Week 31 Reading (2026) Virginia Woolf & Samuel Delany

Virginia Woolf. Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. 2nd ed. Harcourt, 1985. The earliest of the five pieces in Moments of Being is “Reminiscences,” begun in 1907. Written when Woolf was just a fledgling writer, it is addressed to the unborn child of her sister Vanessa, who had just married Clive Bell that year. Their son Julian was born the following year. As a result, this recollection of Virginia and Vanessa’s childhood is written a bit stiffly, yet there is great charm to the way in which it is addressed directly to her future nephew/niece. “A Sketch of the Past,” on the other hand, was written in 1939, less than two years before her death and it’s Woolf at her best—casual, humorous, precise, hyper-perceptive, and always aware of a writer’s limits. Before she can properly begin this memoir (which Vanessa urged her to write), she must elucidate “the memoir writer’s difficulties” and tell us why it “is so difficult to describe any human being.” This, in spite…