Artist at a Crossroads

Woolf’s 1928 diary offers the reflections of an artist at a juncture: “some uneasy sense, of change,” she writes in her first entry. Orlando’s completion and surprise success dominates this diary. However, the problem is what to write next. The artistic crossroads Woolf faces in November involves nonfiction and fiction, the external and the internal, and the will to explore. Woolf both probes and resolves the tension in two November diary entries. One answer is to refine her turn-and-turn-about tack. She will allow works of “talent” to relieve her works of “genius.” More importantly, she will try “to saturate every atom” to reach a deeper mix. Her loose-leaf diary experiment ends with the first 1929 diary, the final diary in her second, lean modernist stage. If Orlando unfurled across the 1928 diary, the first 1929 diary resounds with A Room of One’s Own. However, Woolf also readies herself for her coming battle with The Waves. She will need her courage as she begins “a time of adventure and attack, rather lonely and painful.” But her diary continues to help her; in fact, she moves at the end to give it even firmer life in a bound diary book.

Jealousy, Illness, and Diary Rescue

Can a diary help heal and restore? Emphatically. In her 1921 diary Woolf faces two foes. The first is physical and mental exhaustion, a danger that will arise periodically across her life. In 1921, Hogarth Press work takes the time previously given to her diary—to her peril. In early January, she gives over her diary’s “casual half hours after tea” to Russian lessons for Hogarth Press translations of Chekhov, the Tolstoys, and more. The Woolfs also devote the year to printing Bloomsbury works, making the months ripe for rivalry—for literary envy of several shades. Woolf falls ill after hearing of James Joyce’s “prodigious” novel, Ulysses; however, once more she turns to her diary for rescue: to medicine herself. The diary becomes an anodyne, “a comforter” or “reliever of pain.” During this time, Woolf links arms with (and salutes) another literary doctor: Anton Chekhov. She draws the title of the only short story collection she publishes in her life, the 1921 Monday or Tuesday, from Chekhov’s Note-book[s], published the same month by the Hogarth Press.

Introduction

Virginia Woolf's diary is her longest, her longest sustained, and her last work to reach the public. The Introduction presents the book’s main argument, the new view that Woolf entered a second stage as a diarist (after her first experimental stage)—that of her mature, spare, modernist diaries of 1918 to 1929. Woolf deliberately curbs her number of diary entries per year in this second stage, pushing the periodic diary about as far as it can go and still convey a life. The Introduction also documents Woolf’s increasingly inward turn across the 1920s and her continued modernist experiments with form, especially with the fragment. A diary’s inherent oppositions, its “symmetry … of discords” (Woolf’s diary phrase) allowed Woolf to explore a string of paradoxes: continuity and discontinuity, motion and stasis, impersonal and personal time. The insights of the great French diary theorist Philippe Lejeune are used to undergird the book’s argument that diary-writing now becomes a way of life for Virginia Woolf, “life insurance” that brings high returns. The Introduction also previews the book’s second major insight: the heretofore unexplored role of other diaries in Woolf’s revered modernist works.

Epilogue

A crisis in November 1918 propels Woolf into her second diary stage: that of her thirteen mature, spare, modernist diaries, 1918 to 1929. These semiprivate diaries reveal her steady growth into her distinctive modernist style. She reaches toward new realms with her 1920 diary, turning inward toward the soul and also toward literature. She moves closer to her distinctive voice and activates her rhythmic “turn-and-turn-about” movement in her 1922 and 1923 diaries. Woolf pares her diary entries and begins to flower into poetry in 1924. Most notably, she never stops her intellectual and artistic stretch. Others’ diaries refresh her across the 1920s—and supply rich matter for modernist use. Several of Woolf’s most memorable modernist phrases, images, and moments are offered to her in multiple diaries: the lighthouse, “a room of one’s own,” Professor von X, and Judith Shakespeare. Other elements she borrows from just one diary: Mrs. Ramsay and summer holidays at the Scottish seaside with “a large and clever family,” the figure moved to the middle of a painting, £500, and “derision.” A cornerstone of Woolf’s genius was her understanding of the treasure residing in diaries and her ability to absorb that bounty and transmute it into art.

The Loose-Leaf Diary

In 1927, Woolf embarks on a two-and-a-half-year experiment with a loose-leaf diary, meant to catch more stray or “loose” thoughts. Her 1927 loose-leaf diary seems to plunge her into her creative unconscious. An off-handed air emerges from this diary, which seems a holding pond spontaneously spouting scenes. Orlando comes to her in this diary and the play-poem The Waves. The loose-leaf diary both invites unfettered fancy and serves as a site to preserve, and even restrain, Woolf’s “gushing mind” as she enjoys the “ardour and lust of creation.” Touchingly, at this time when Woolf is awash in spontaneous invention, she reads in August 1927 the first published version of Katherine Mansfield’s Journal. She could hardly fail to note there Mansfield’s greater struggle and self-doubt. Yet Woolf finds Mansfield's Journal most suggestive. Mansfield endorses androgyny there; she describes an imaginary child who changes gender. Journal passages also resonate uncannily with Woolf’s own growing ideas for The Waves, and Mansfield offers the concept of “derision” which Woolf will take for Three Guineas. More than anything, however, Mansfield’s 1927 Journal presents Woolf with ideas and a cautionary life story for A Room of One’s Own.

Renewed Diary Experiment

Woolf expands her 1926 diary. In February, she begins “a new convention”: starting each entry on a new page, her “habit in writing serious literature.” In May, she reaches outward toward public history with a diary of the General Strike. She then turns inward for eleven titled “State of Mind” probes: probes of the boundaries between sense, thought, and art. In October, she imagines “an endeavour at something mystic, spiritual; the thing that exists when we aren’t there.” The diaries she reads propel her toward this place. Across the year Woolf returns often to Beatrice Webb’s memoir My Apprenticeship, woven around diary extracts. These extracts supply notions for To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Flush, and Three Guineas—and especially for A Room of One’s Own and “Professions for Women.” In September, Woolf reviews the Journals of Thomas Cobden-Sanderson. His questing journals encourage Woolf’s search for “the mystical side of this solitude,” she writes, or what Webb calls the great Unknown. Soon after, Woolf reviews the Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography and Journals. Haydon’s Journals offer her a memorable moment for To the Lighthouse and matter for A Room of One’s Own—and more.

Voice and Motion

Virginia Woolf moves toward her distinctive voice and finds her rhythmic movement in her 1922 and 1923 diary books. Her 1922 diary stands out as one of her most resilient diaries. Across the year, she turns from male voices repeatedly—and with assurance. In fact, she replaces “unsympathetic” male voices, male sites, and male works with female. She feels she is striking now closer to her own voice. She also activates the “quick change” movement envisioned in her 1921 diary. In her 1923 diary she moves on many levels. She writes six (surface) play scenes in her diary while also pursuing her soul and the rush of “extraordinary emotions” she begins to feel. She seeks greater freedom and movement and sets her eyes on London once more. In 1922, Woolf reads Alie Badenhorst’s Boer War Diary, a powerful anti-war document and important addition to her understanding of women and war. In July 1923, she receives James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to Corsica. She finds there a journal bold in experiment; rich in portraits, voice, and movement; and baring of the soul.

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.

Spare, Modernist Perfection

Woolf appears in consummate command in her 1924 diary. She curbs her number of diary entries and brakes her previous need for praise. London supplies the motion she craves. As she finishes Mrs. Dalloway and her Common Reader essays, she sends out shoots of other works. The diaries she reads assist her. The Letters and Journals of Anne Chalmers, which Woolf reviews in February 1924, were edited by Chalmers’ daughter. They recall and preserve a dead mother, describe summer holidays at the Scottish seaside with “a large and clever family,” and even offer the name Mrs. Ramsay. Woolf then reads The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West, another case of a daughter thinking back through, and immortalizing, a dead foremother. Lady Clifford's Renaissance diary also offers women’s history and grist for Woolf’s essays “The Elizabethan Lumber Room” and “Donne after Three Centuries.” Even more important, its tale of a ferocious fight over a daughter’s inheritance inspires the plot of Orlando. In July, Woolf reviews the early journals of Stendhal, the father of the psychological novel. They direct her mind (yet again) to the soul and to the many nuances and contradictions of character.

Rush, Urgency, Wound, and Rescue

Woolf’s 1925 diary repeats the alarming scenario of her 1921 diary. In January and February 1925, Woolf gives over her diary time to ready The Common Reader and Mrs. Dalloway for Hogarth Press. She substitutes work for diary refreshment, just as in 1921 she replaced her diary with Russian lessons before her summer collapse. Each time she does not fully reckon the physical toll and mental strain of her unrelieved work. In 1925, Woolf also underestimates the drain of her new London social life. Her diary, however, signals the danger. The projected glorious fall start of To the Lighthouse becomes collapse and months of headache, causing Woolf to call 1925 “this wounded and stricken year.” Yet as in 1921 and 1918, Woolf makes in her diary a remarkable rescuing move. In December, she seizes on Vita Sackville-West as rescue, just as she created “Elderly Virginia” at the end of 1918. In June, she finds that Jonathan Swift’s famed Journal to Stella addresses uncannily several of her own current trials. In Orlando, she will have Orlando meet the prickly Irishman of the Journal to Stella. Swift’s Journal offers fuel for A Room of One’s Own as well.