When Virginia Woolf, in this famous passage from her unfinished and posthumously published memoir ‘Sketch of the Past’ (1976), outlines her ‘philosophy’ or ‘constant idea’, she presents us with a ‘conception’ of life that is embedded in materiality: a ‘pattern’, ‘hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life’ (MB 85). It is, as Mark Hussey has recently put it, a form of theorising that is ‘grounded’ and ‘embodied’, and other critics have placed emphasis on Woolf's formulation of human communality through language and art: Lorraine Sim, for example, writes of ‘a connective principle’ in Woolf's ‘pattern’ which is revealed through art and society; Emily Hinnov claims, more explicitly, that ‘Woolf views aesthetics as a vehicle for social action that might bring about humanistic unity […].