Clear-sightedness can seem cruel: To not gloss over the disfiguring blemish on a cheek, not ignore the badly patched jacket of genteel poverty, not avert your eyes from some instant of crushing embarrassment or humiliation. Yet such unflinching steadiness of sight is what thrills us in certain writers. And maybe such exactitude is the precondition of compassion. I don’t mean the sleeve-tugging compassion of Dickens but the kind of sympathy that arises unbidden in the face of some complex distress, as though we too, for a moment, participated in that unsparing clarity.

Of modern novelists no one achieved this more piercingly than Virginia Woolf. The marvel of her best fiction is that she gives us the person or the object or the scene with startling precision while at the same time suggesting the consciousness that is apprehending it, so that there is something at once factual and impressionistic in her prose. This, we think, is how we see the world, solid and hard-edged yet shimmery, too, as though what stood before our eyes were aureoled by some enhanced awareness. Mrs. Dalloway’s flowers are real enough to smell, but they are also, by the magic of Woolf’s style, “bright shoots of everlastingness.” After we close the novel, they waft some fragrance in our memories that summons back the woman who cherished them so.

This was Woolf’s great gift, one of many, but it wasn’t easily realized. She had to work hard to refine and perfect her genius. She not only wrote continually but observed, took note, scrutinized; she made herself, as Henry James put it earlier, “one on whom nothing is lost.” Without sentimentality or mercy she whetted the innate cruelty of her eye against the hard grindstone of the real.

Thanks to a fortuitous discovery, we can now see for ourselves how Woolf persevered in this discipline. “Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches” (Hesperus, 52 pages, $12), edited by David Bradshaw, contains seven brief pieces Woolf wrote in 1909, six years before “The Voyage Out,” her first novel, was published. The sketches were committed to a notebook that Woolf herself bound in brown paper and dated February 27, 1909. The notebook was among the unpublished writings Leonard Woolf sent for transcription after Virginia’s suicide in 1941; when he died, the typist, uncertain how to proceed, tucked the untranscribed notebook into a bottom drawer. It remained there until 2002.

In a journal from 1903, Woolf described the purpose of such notebook writing: “The only use of this book is that it shall serve for a sketch book; as an artist fills his pages with scraps & fragments, studies of drapery – legs, arms & noses – useful to him no doubt, but of no meaning to anyone else.” She went on to remark, “It is an exercise – training for eye & hand – roughness if it results from an honest desire to put down the truth with whatever materials one has to hand.” This describes the obvious purpose of the sketches in “Carlyle’s House,” as Woolf put it in a journal from 1908: “to write not only with the eye, but with the mind; & discover real things beneath the show.”

This principle is at work in all the sketches, apprentice work though they are. Of Sir George Darwin she writes, “It is strange that a man who must have known great men, and who is at work always upon great problems, should have nothing distinguished or remarkable about him. At first one is mildly relieved, and later, one is disappointed.” This is not meant to be catty (as so many delicious remarks in her Journals are), but just. It strains a bit until the summing up; relief followed by disappointment rings right.

Again, in her description of Amber Reeves, one of H.G. Wells’s (innumerable) lovers, she writes: “I met her at dinner last night. She has dark hair, an oval face, with a singularly small mouth: a line is pencilled on her upper lip. She reminds me of the girl whose mother was a snake. There is something of the snake in her. Her eyes are not large, but very bright, hazel colour. She always leans forward, as though to take flight.” Obviously we are far from the great evocations of “Mrs. Dalloway” or “To the Lighthouse” or any of the other masterpieces of her later years but it is instructive, and almost touching, to see the 27-year-old Woolf struggling to capture a character in a face.

One sketch shows Woolf at her worst, the sketch titled “Jews.” This is a nasty impression of “Mrs. Loeb” (probably, the editor tells us in his copious notes, Mrs. Annie Loeb), which is blatantly anti-Semitic. The editor valiantly defends Woolf, without attempting to excuse her, by noting that she married Leonard Woolf, who was Jewish, three years later, and that she was only sporadically anti-Semitic in any case. But it just doesn’t wash. The sketch is ugly and inexcusable, especially from the pen of so alertly sensitive a writer.

There is only one possible sign in these pages of the despair that would torment and finally destroy Woolf. In the sketch titled “Cambridge,” she describes meeting with James Strachey, Rupert Brooke, and the mathematician H.T.J. Norton in Strachey’s Cambridge rooms. After listening to their casual and earnest chat, she remarks, “Why should intellect and character be so barren? It seemed as though the highest efforts of the most civilized people produced a negative result: one could not honestly be anything.” Two years later she would complain of “black, hairy devils” of depression and note “To be 29 and unmarried – to be a failure – childless – insane too, no writer.”

Her marriage to Leonard, in 1912, and their work together on the Hogarth Press gave her respite and enabled her to write her greatest novels, but the fear of madness persisted. The fear seems to have been as terrible as the madness itself. As I read her early sketches with this in mind, I couldn’t help wondering whether, snob and bigot though she often was, Woolf’s strenuous clarity of sight was not the consequence – as well as the price – of this lifelong dread.