title: A Writer's Diary
author:  Virginia Woolf 
description: <DIV><DIV>VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882&#8211;1941) was&#160;one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels.</DIV></DIV>
zlib_text: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## _About the Book_
  
  
  ![image](../Images/common.jpg)
  
  
  Virginia Woolf’s only autobiographical writing, outside her diaries and
  letters, is to be found in this collection of five pieces. Despite many
  biographies and studies of her, the author’s own account of her early life
  holds tremendous fascination – for its unexpected detail, the strength of its
  emotion, and its clear-sighted judgement of Victorian values.
  
  
  In ‘Reminiscences’ Virginia Woolf focuses on her mother’s death, ‘the greatest
  disaster that could happen’, and its effect on her father, the demanding
  patriarch who took a high toll of the women in his household. She surveys some
  of the same ground in ‘Sketch of the Past’, the most important memoir in this
  collection, which she wrote with deep feeling and supreme command of her art
  shortly before her own death. Readers will be struck by the extent to which
  she drew on these early experiences for her novels, as she tells how she
  exorcised the haunting presence of