“A Romantic in Sirius” Virginia Woolf’s Post-Wordsworthian Autobiography

This article explores the influence of Wordsworth’s spots of time on Woolf’s moments of being. Building on an early review by Edwin Muir that highlighted Mrs Dalloway ’s deep engagement with Wordsworth’s poetic vision, it examines two key aspects of The Prelude that Woolf may have inherited: the transcendental and anamnestic quality of remembrance and the epiphanic nature of recollection. These elements contribute to a reassessment of Woolf’s impressionism, understood as the complex foundation of her aesthetic vision. Situating moments of being within Romantic autobiography, the article considers how they reflect the self’s attitude towards memory, and it also shows how Woolf first developed epiphanic recollection in her 1920s novels and impressionism in her 1920s short fiction. She later reframed both strands in her autobiographical writings.