Virginia Woolf worked on "A Sketch of the Past" late in her life, from 1939 to 1940, writing the last of it only four months before her death. In it, she focuses on her childhood in an upper-middle class household in late Victorian Britain.

One of her themes is that the world changes over time; her critique of biography and memoir is how little they capture the intangible aspects and the effect of people already dead (what she calls the "invisible presences") on how life felt or was lived on a personal basis in a particular period. Much of what provides the texture of a life, she writes, comes not from "facts," but from the details of a time. As she puts it:

Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes form decade to decade; and also from class to class; well, if we cannot analyse these invisible presences, we know very little of the subject of the memoir; and again how futile life-writing becomes.

She writes as well that "the past is much affected by the present moment." This concern for capturing a sense of how social and political change feels on a granular basis—in the way a lived life is experienced day-to-day—leads her to dwell on "moments of being." These are not the big events of history, such as the beginning of World War I, but moments when the ordinary hits us with such force that an event we would normally forget suddenly crystallizes. These memories, Woolf says, are significant, because they carry with them the kind of detail that makes another time period come alive.

Woolf lived through a period of rapid social change and found it almost impossible, for instance, in the 1930s to locate people like her mother or her half sister Stella, products of the Victorian world. People, she believed, had changed due to social and political changes: it was no longer possible for women to be like these relatives who died before the changes.

Not only in "A Sketch of the Past" but in other writing, Woolf was attempting to come to grips with and express what her childhood world was like. She wished to convey the changes that had occurred on the micro-level of lived experience. To understand the bigger political and social level, she believed, one had to understand the details of everyday life.