Some of Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical essays are collected in a book called Moments of Being. There is one essay called “A Sketch of the Past,” in which Woolf talks among other things about losing both her parents in short succession by the time she was fifteen, and having to move from their country estate to a London house, where their older stepbrother became Virginia and Vanessa’s guardian, and also molested them. It was not an easy adolescence. Here she is puzzling over the possible value of pain–and I appreciate that she doesn’t come out and say “yes, this suffering was good for me, this made me an artist.” She stays in the puzzling.
“But at fifteen to have that protection removed, to be tumbled out of the family shelter, to see cracks and gashes in that fabric, to be cut by them, to see beyond them—was that good? Did it give one an experience that even if it was painful, yet meant that the gods (as I used to phrase it) were taking one seriously; and giving one a job which they would not think it worthwhile giving, say to Meg and Imogen Booth, say to Ida and Sylvia Milman? I had my visual way of putting it. I would see (after Thoby’s death) two great grindstones (as I walked round Gordon Sqe) and myself between them. I would typify a contest between myself and “them”—some invisible giant. I would reason, or fancy that if life were thus made to rear and kick, it was at any rate, the real thing. Nobody could say that I had been fobbed off with an unmeaning slip of the precious matter. So I came to think of life as something of extreme reality. And this, of course, increased my feeling of my own importance. Not in relation to other human beings: in relation to the force which had respected me sufficiently to make me feel what was real.”
[Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” Moments of Being, p. 118.]