Moments of Being
Moments of Being is a collection of posthumously-published autobiographical essays by Virginia Woolf. The collection was first found in the papers of her husband, used by Quentin Bell in his biography of Virginia Woolf, published in 1972. In 1976, the essays were edited for publication by Jeanne Schulkind. The second edition was published in 1985. The original texts are now housed at Sussex University and in the British Library in London.
Title
The title for the collection was chosen by its original editor, Jeanne Schulkind, based on a passage from "A Sketch of the Past". As described by Woolf, 'moments of being' are moments in which an individual experiences a sense of reality, in contrast to the states of 'non-being' that dominate most of an individual's conscious life, in which they are separated from reality by a protective covering. Moments of being could be a result of instances of shock, discovery, or revelation.
Contents
Moments of Being consists of five autobiographical essays:
- "Reminiscences" (1907)
- "A Sketch of the Past" (1939–40)
- "22 Hyde Park Gate" (1920–1)
- "Old Bloomsbury" (1921–2)
- "Am I a Snob?" (1936)
"22 Hyde Park Gate", "Old Bloomsbury" and "Am I a Snob?" were written for the Memoir Club, a group formed in 1920 by Molly MacCarthy which met to present honest autobiographical papers.
Sources
- Literary Encyclopaedia: Moments of Being
- v
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- Bibliography
- The Voyage Out
- Night and Day
- Jacob's Room
- Mrs Dalloway
- film
- To the Lighthouse
- Orlando: A Biography
- film
- The Waves
- The Years
- Between the Acts
- "The Mark on the Wall"
- "Kew Gardens"
- Monday or Tuesday
- "The String Quartet"
- "The New Dress"
- "The Duchess and the Jeweller"
- A Haunted House and Other Short Stories
- "The Widow and the Parrot"
- Freshwater
- Flush: A Biography
- Roger Fry: A Biography
- "Modern Fiction"
- Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
- On Being Ill
- A Room of One's Own
- The London Scene
- Three Guineas
- "A Letter to a Young Poet"
- Moments of Being
- Bloomsbury Group
- Hogarth Press
- Monk's House
- Dreadnought hoax
- Leonard Woolf (husband)
- Julia Stephen (mother)
- Leslie Stephen (father)
- Vanessa Bell (sister)
- Thoby Stephen (brother)
- Adrian Stephen (brother)
- The Hours (novel)
- The Hours (film)
- The Hours (opera)
- From the Diary of Virginia Woolf (song cycle)