The question of place

 Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey were having tea, meaning they were having a delicious conversation. She brought up the subject of place.

When we read a lot, qw tend to place writers. We put them in categories — eras and genres being less problematic than evaluations of talent.

The two writers mused over where they might be placed. Some critic had called Woolf “the ablest of living women novelists.” Strachey, known for his biographical essays, wanted to be placed “a little better than Macaulay.”

The whole question is foreign to me. The kind of writing I most admire is the writing you do for yourself. Montaigne is a good example of a person who wrote to work out what he thought. The fact that others appreciated his work was a happy accident, irrelevant to the value of the work.

Writing is something you do for yourself. Place is something other people do to you.

• Source: Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, entry for April 29, 1921.