“In addition, during the period April to November, when the first section of "A Sketch" was written, she and Leonard moved house and his mother died. In what seems to me an amazing feat of creative energy, she brought to bear all of these deep personal anxieties on a literary question that had always troubled her, namely the preoccupation of memoir writers with events, so that "they leave out the person to whom things happened" ("Sketch" 65)” (Dalgarno).
“"A Sketch" lies on the border between public and private writing, neither a draft of a work intended for publication, nor a diary. Woolf herself referred to the work as a "memoir" (64,98) and as "notes" (75,95,100,117). John Mepham discusses the status of "A Sketch" at length, observing that it is both memoir and diary,"and gives the life-writing activity itself a context."” (Dalgarno).
While “A Sketch of the Past” does seem to be an exercise in writing personally about ones life, I tend to be of the mind that it meant to be published because of the honesty and sincerity with which she set about her task. Unfinished as it may have been, Woolf has a direct purpose with writing this work and it is such:
“Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties—one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: “This is what happened”; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. Who was I then?” (A Sketch 2156).
Her issues lie with describing herself accurately, because like most people she does not have a clear sense of herself.
“I do not know how far I differ from other people. That is another memoir writer’s difficulty. Yet to describe oneself truly one must have some standard of comparison; was I clever, stupid, good looking, ugly, passionate, cold--?... I have never been able to compare my gifts and defects with other people’s” (2156).
Woolf turns to sense memory and impressions to rectify this problem, probing deeper into the self as she does yet only speculating about the past. She reveals more about herself at her present state and her ways of viewing the world, “all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt; looked. But again I cannot describe that rapture. It was rapture rather than ecstasy” (2157).
She felt that her sense memories were able to transport her and could almost effect time itself bringing her to a liminal space where she could observe the surroundings of her youth.
“At times I can go back to St. Ives more completely than I can this morning. Can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen…Now if this is so, is it not possible—I often wonder—that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it—the past—as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions” (2157).
This work, “Sketches of the Past” is an exercise in experiences, capturing them, recording them and reinterpreting them each time they are remembered as much as one can truly remember anything. These issues of time, sense memory and experience are recurrent themes in her work, and are further explored in the context of the conscious and unconscious mind (i.e. “A Mark on the Wall”, “Orlando”, “Mrs. Dalloway”).