This is an interesting little book that I picked up solely because I love Virginia Woolf and thought it would be fun to read through some of her writing sketches. I didn’t realize that instead it would be extracts from a journal she kept in 1909. When I first read through the pieces – I read them before reading the foreword, introduction, or commentary – I thought they were sketches (as the subtitle “and Other Sketches” suggests) of characters and scenes. In that respect, I thought the book was quite interesting. But then, when I read the rest of the parts of the book, I realized that these were journal entries, and thus not nearly as interesting to me. It didn’t help that the collection was begun with a foreword by Doris Lessing, a foreword that is biting, sarcastic, and horrible in tone, and which I half-skipped because it made me hate Lessing (a person I had no feeling about at all before). I don’t know. It was sort of like when I read the journal parts of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams collection from Sylvia Plath. They were well written, but not particularly my favorite thing to read. I really didn’t get much out of this collection, which is sad.