Sublime

The essay ends in a kind of dream—with the image of a plush red curtain clasped and crushed in grief. And we’re happy to follow Woolf there, in part, because of that dash in her opening sentence, which denotes a passage from the dream-fugue of sickness, depression, and undirected reading into the dirigible madness of writing.

The other great lesson to take from Virginia Woolf is her attitude to failure, which was extremely open. She recognized that it was necessary to go through a lot of self-doubt and self-examination before you could say anything that really mattered.

ou can hear in the delaying rhythms of the opening sentence the influence of Marcel Proust and the digressive, paid-by-the-word style of Thomas De Quincey, whose essays Woolf had lately looked into for the first time

‘Motherhood is an obliteration of the self,’