title: A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf
author: Ilana Simons
description: <b>Ilana R. Simons</b> teaches at The New School in New York City. A recipient of the Willy Gorrissen Award for Teaching Excellence and the Molberger Fellowship for modernist scholarship, she is in training as a clinical psychologist.
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  EVERYMAN,  
  
  
    
  
  
  I WILL GO WITH THEE,  
  
  
    
  
  
  AND BE THY GUIDE,  
  
  
    
  
  
  IN THY MOST NEED  
  
  
    
  
  
  TO GO BY THY SIDE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  >
  
  
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  INTRODUCTION
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  In her introduction to the 1928 American edition of Mrs Dalloway Virginia
  Woolf maintains that a novel comes to the writer just as flowers and fruit
  come to a tree ‘which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest
  life, of our first experience’. She seems here to be alluding to Keats, a poet
  she loved. In a famous letter to John Taylor, Keats had confessed to a
  childish and absurd desire for creation without pain: ‘If Poetry comes not as
  naturally as Leaves to the tree it had better not come at all.’ But while
  using the same metaphor, Virginia Woolf also displaces it: she does not
  emphasize so much the naturalness of something which is born without effort
  and which gives joy, but stresses what the created thing feeds on. Whether or
  not what a writer writes is autobiographical