Woolf without camouflage

Carlyle's House is the result of a recent literary "find" - an early notebook of Virginia Woolf 's, given to a typist in 1968 by her husband Leonard, who died later that year. The notebook was put in a drawer, where it lay untouched for more than three decades.

Readers of Woolf 's diaries will recognise aspects of the new material the 1909 notebook contains, though unfortunately wit and erudition are not among them. Rather, the journals' occasional upsurges of brutality and cattiness are more nakedly present in these earlier writings, lacking, as they do, the camouflage of their author's later genius.

Doris Lessing observes, in her introduction, that "she is a writer some people love to hate. It is painful when someone whose judgment you respect comes out with a hymn of dislike, or even hate, for Virginia Woolf." I agree: but this description neatly encapsulates Woolf 's own great character fault, the singing of hymns of dislike.

In 1909, as yet unsweetened by creative or social success, nor stabilised by marriage and intellectual recognition, Woolf was capable of emotional violence. Her hymns were indeed hymns of hate.

The sketches touch, however, on various subjects that Woolf would later make her own: the misogynist elitism of educational institutions; the evolving character of women; the dissonance of class in English society; the gulf between the Victorian world and the modern.

Her great gift for observation, too, cannot help but produce some pleasing moments in these writings. In Cambridge, she gives a snapshot of the Darwin family, whom she visited at home. In A Modern Salon she describes the ubiquitous yet enigmatic Lady Ottoline Morrell. ("She is a great lady who has become discontented with her own class and has found what she wanted in the class of artists, writers and professional people.")

In Hampstead, she begins what became one of the most amusing of her later diaries' narrat ions: the various episodes in her lifelong relationships with the founders of such early feminist institutions as the Women's Co-operative Guild. The highlight of these pieces is her description of the visit she paid, while in Cambridge, to James Strachey at his university lodgings, where she had tea with Strachey, Rupert Brooke and the mathematician HTJ Norton.

"The three young men ... sat in deep chairs; and gazed with soft intent eyes into the fire. Mr Norton knew that he must talk, and he and I spoke laboriously. It was a very difficult duet; the other instruments keeping silent ... They wished for the truth, and doubted whether a woman could speak it or be it."

It is for this sort of passage that Woolf has become the patron saint of women writers everywhere: but even this early glimpse of her greatness cannot foot the bill for the unpleasantness of the sketch, Jews. In spite of the fact that it was written early in her life, and that she later came to regret her anti-Semitism, it tarnishes her: it is unfortunate that it was published.

What is strange is that pages earlier Woolf shows a fine and brave understanding, as she did all her life, of what it is to be the object of bigotry; in this case sexism. Yet one can imagine her victims feeling of her exactly what she felt of the men in the room in Cambridge.