The collection was first found in the papers of her husband, used by Quentin Bell in his biography of Virginia Woolf, published in 1972.

The original texts are now housed at Sussex University and in the British Library in London.

The title for the collection was chosen by its original editor, Jeanne Schulkind, based on a passage from "A Sketch of the Past".

Moments of Being consists of five autobiographical essays: "22 Hyde Park Gate", "Old Bloomsbury" and "Am I a Snob?"

were written for the Memoir Club, a group formed in 1920 by Molly MacCarthy which met to present honest autobiographical papers.