Moments of Being
by Virginia Woolf
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Book Summary Information
Author: Virginia WoolfEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1985-08-23
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of Moments of Being
Book Review: Woolf's most beautiful autobiographical writing
Summary: 5 Stars
People who have enjoyed Woolf's novels or diaries will surely find her essay "A Sketch of the Past" deeply moving and helpful in illuminating her other works. In "Sketch," the longest essay in this volume, Woolf recounts her earliest childhood memories--both beautiful (hearing the waves break on the shore at her family's summer home) and sinister (her stepbrother's unwelcome sexual advances when she was a small child). She develops a theory about memory and about transcendent experience in this essay. She discusses her powerful drive to reshape and write about the past: "I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start." In this essay Woolf proposes that in moments of ecstasy we have a meaningful vision of the world itself: "it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we--I mean all human beings--are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words, we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock."
Summary of 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.
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