“A Living Mosaic of Human Beings”: The Life Writing of Virginia Woolf and Zitkala-Ša

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