Abstract
This essay examines life writing by English author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša (1876-1938), specifically Woolf’s memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” written in 1939-40 and first published in Moments of Being in 1976, and Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical essays, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900. This comparative study explores how both women establish selfhood amid competing pressures vying for their minds and bodies; how mothers and maternal loss shape their autobiographies; how physical and psychological place and displacement influence their life writing; and how matters of audience affect their literary self-portraits. Reading Woolf and Zitkala-Ša together yields fresh insights into the intersections of race, class, gender, and feminism in women’s writing.
Highlights
Over several months in 1939 and 1940, Virginia Woolf wrote “A Sketch of the Past” (1985), memoirs she began in part as a break from writing her biography of Roger Fry
She relates her earliest impressions, her memories of her mother, and her response to her mother’s death when she was thirteen. She writes of the aftermath of that death, her problematic relationship with her father, her and her sister Vanessa’s maturity into adulthood, and the pressure exerted upon them by their half-brothers to comply with patriarchal social norms. She considers the nature of biography, autobiography, and memory
Exploring their responses to patriarchal and colonial paradigms, how mothers and maternal loss shape their autobiographies, how physical and psychological place and displacement influence their lives and writing, and how matters of audience affect their literary self-portraits “enables us to chart an understudied genealogy of feminist critique in autobiographical forms,” as Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall explain in their 2019 study of intersectional women’s life writing (14)
Summary
Over several months in 1939 and 1940, Virginia Woolf wrote “A Sketch of the Past” (1985), memoirs she began in part as a break from writing her biography of Roger Fry.1 She relates her earliest impressions, her memories of her mother, and her response to her mother’s death when she was thirteen. Virginia Woolf and Zitkala-Ša begin their life writing, understandably enough, with their earliest childhood impressions.
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