New Diary Realms
Woolf seeks out new realms in her 1920 diary. In January, she wonders how far she should allow herself to report indiscretion in her diary. In March, she ponders something more profound: whether she can write “a diary of the soul.” In April, she considers whether her diary can “trench upon literature”—another (but related) realm, as the soul holds her “precious art.” On her thirty-eighth birthday, January 25, 1920, she had conceived of “a new form for a new novel”—her first modernist novel, Jacob’s Room. Declaring that she could “think [herself] a novelist” if she could record “talk,” Woolf experiments across her 1920 diary with different ways to render conversations. She practices, in short, for her public prose. In April, she is sent W.N.P. Barbellion’s famous Journal of a Disappointed Man. It spurs her exploration of the soul, offers her half the plot of Mrs. Dalloway, and helps her envision To the Lighthouse to come. In October, she publishes a lengthy commemorative essay on John Evelyn’s diary, probing the diary’s power—and also how this seventeenth-century diarist differs from his contemporary descendants.