Special Commissioned Essay on Virginia Woolf, Philip Tew - Woolf At Work
WOOLF AT WORK
GETTING ESTABLISHED
Woolf left myriad reflections about her life. They are found in her fiction and in the numerous expressions of her fears about the reception of her work expressed in the diaries she kept from 1915 until her death. From the diaries it is possible to reconstruct the development of her mature career, but there remains much less material on her earlier years, when she started first writing. Woolf took a long time to become established as a novelist. She started the surviving diary when she was thirty-three years old and unpublished. Yet, long before the time of her first novel, something in Woolf seems to have marked her with the desire to become a writer. She possessed an early natural propensity for telling stories in childhood. Certainly, she aspired to please others with her precocious writing and storytelling. Woolf described in the diaries the impulse for her experiments with various kinds of writing, including memories...
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