The Relationship between Past and Present

This is the dominant theme of the book, playing out on several levels. On perhaps the most fundamental one, it is the reason for the book's existence. Virginia Woolf's interest in, and examinations of, this relationship are the reasons she wrote what she did in these memoirs and in the way she did. Secondly, the observations Virginia makes about the relationship between past and present appear throughout these writings, which, as the editor notes in her introduction, were created at very different times in Virginia's personal and creative life. This makes these observations of the relationship, and her comments on them, the unifying (thematic) thread tying these observations together. On another level, her analysis of the relationship seems, at least in the writings here, to lead her to make conclusions about not only who and why she is who she is, but why...