Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer

By the time she was twenty-four, Virginia Woolf had suffered a series of devastating losses that later she would describe as “sledge-hammer blows,” beginning with the death of her mother when she was thirteen years old and followed by those of her half-sister, father, and brother. Yet vulnerable as she was (“skinless” was her word) she began, through these years, to practice her art—and to discover how it could serve her. Ultimately, she came to feel that it was her “shock-receiving capacit...