1938–40: Life-Writing

Abstract

Before Three Guineas was published Virginia Woolf had already started, in April 1938, on two new books. One of them, the biography of her friend Roger Fry, was to be the last of her books published in her lifetime. She had, since 1935, been reading her way through a mountain of documents relating to his life in preparation for this book. It was finished in February 1940 and published in July of that year. The other, Pointz Hall (or Between the Acts as it came to be called) was finished but not yet revised for publication when she killed herself in March 1941. In April 1939, she began, in addition, to write notes for a memoir. This was later published as ‘A Sketch of the Past’ in the posthumous collection of autobiographical pieces called Moments of Being. Thus, quite apart from other lectures, articles, reviews and stories which she also wrote in these three years, she was usually actively working on two, and sometimes three, major projects simultaneously. Her will to write never faltered until perhaps the very last month of her life. Each of these works is different in conception both from anything she had ever written before and from each other. She still took each new project, whenever she could, as an opportunity to refashion the conventions of prose literature.

‘If you are old, the past lies upon the present, like a thick glass, making it waver, distorting it.’ (CE II 293)