Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

Prose is so humble that it can go anywhere. No place is too low or too sorted or too mean for it to enter. It is infinitely patient too, humbly

acquisitive. It can lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute

fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle

labyrinths and listen silently at doors.

Those are the words of Virginia Wolf, considered by some to be one of the great British writers.

And she's the choice of my guest today, Sarah Pasco, a writer, comedian and actress,

who's starred in the TV series Campus, 2012 and W1A, but who's best known as a stand-up and who says,

I don't think there are any subjects you can't joke about because human beings are forgiving of subject matter when we find things funny

Her debut book Animal was released earlier this year.

Sarah you make a living making people laugh. Is there much

comedy in Virginia Woolf? There's lots of comedy in Virginia Woolf. I think she

was a comedian. I think if she'd been born now. I mean she's exactly a hundred years older than me and part of the reason I found it so fascinating finding out more about her life for this show is in some ways things that were happening at the end of Victorian times or it's so

antiquated in comparison her life was so closeted in a way that mine isn't but

she wrote all the time she was egotistical and oversensitive and manic and she was so funny

socially and she gave everyone a little pet name she called herself an old goat and she was rude to people

and witty and could do impressions and every time you hear people describing her,

as well as her writing itself, she was very, very funny and very clever obviously,

that's why we're discussing her.

But yeah, I think she was a comic.

You said you decided to find out more about her.

What caused you?

...