The Diary of Virginia Woolf by Virginia Woolf

First published: 1977-1984

Type of work: Diary

Time of work: 1915-1941

Locale: England, France, and Scotland

Principal Personages:

• Virginia Woolf, a novelist, critic, and biographer
• Leonard Woolf, her husband, an author, publisher, and social critic
• Vanessa Bell, her sister, an artist
• Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband, an art critic
• Julian Bell, the Bells’ elder son, a casualty in the Spanish Civil War
• T. S. Eliot, an American-born poet, critic, and dramatist of note
• E. M. Forster, a major British novelist
• Roger Fry, an art critic and subject of a late book by Virginia Woolf
• Duncan Grant, an artist and intimate of Vanessa Bell
• John Lehmann, the publishing partner of Leonard and Virginia Woolf
• Vita Sackville-West, a poet and novelist
• Lytton Strachey, an author

Form and Content

On January 3, 1897, shortly before her fifteenth birthday, Virginia Stephen began to keep a diary, which she maintained faithfully for much of the year. After the death of her half sister, Stella, in July, however, entries became sparser, and on September 14 she wrote, “We will follow the year to its end & then fling diaries and diarising into the corner—to dust & mire & moths & all creeping crawling eating destroying creatures.” Despite this resolution, she subsequently made a number of attempts at “diarising,” one of these resulting in a daily record for several months in 1905.

Although these manuscripts survive, they are not reprinted in these volumes. Instead, this edition reproduces the contents of thirty notebooks housed in New York Public Library’s Berg Collection of English and American Literature. The first entry is dated January 1, 1915, the last March 24, 1941, four days before her death. Each volume covers roughly five years: Volume 1 includes 1915 through 1919, volume 2 1920 through 1925, volume 3 1926 through 1930, volume 4 1931 through 1935, and volume 5 1936 through 1941. Though the division is arbitrary, each book seems to revolve around a few dominant events and assumes its own tone. The third volume reflects her great personal hope following the publication of The Common Reader (1925) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925). It records the successful completion of her two best works, To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), as well as Orlando: A Biography (1928), shows her increasing financial security and social assurance, and reveals the happiness and support she found in her relationship with Vita Sackville-West. The next volume is darker: She wrestles with The Years (1937); friends die—Lytton Strachey, to whom she had been briefly engaged, in 1932, Roger Fry, her sister’s sometime lover, two years later, and Francis Birrell in 1935; the rise of Fascist regimes betrays the hopes of the 1920’s.

Woolf attempted to write in her diary every day, but there are numerous gaps. The largest appears at the beginning of the first volume; six weeks after starting her journal for 1915, Woolf suffered a severe mental collapse. Thus, there are no entries between February 15, 1915, and August 3, 1917. Thereafter, shorter breaks mark illnesses, travel, or extensive socializing.

The editor, Anne Olivier Bell, wife of Virginia Woolf’s nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, has provided helpful introductions to each volume to highlight important events in Woolf’s life for the years under consideration, and she has prepared comprehensive indexes. Notes identify people and places that might otherwise remain obscure, and short biographies accompany the first mention of the many figures who populate these pages. In each volume after the first Bell includes an appendix with sketches of those most prominent in Woolf’s record for those years.

Bell’s scholarship throughout is impressive. For example, on October 19, 1917, Woolf tells of going to the Aeolian Hall to hear an octet by Franz Schubert. Bell not only gives the address of the concert hall but also identifies the octet (Octet in F, Op. 166). When Woolf mentions taking a walk, Bell notes the distance covered. For those seeking to pursue a point further, she has provided cross-references to letters, reviews, and manuscripts.

Critical Context

While the diary was written hurriedly, often in moments snatched between dressing and dinner or while tea waited downstairs, it remains a literary work in its own right. Its publication is the result of the continuing fascination with Bloomsbury and the growing reputation of Virginia Woolf. Yet it would merit reading even if she were an obscure Georgian lady rather than an important author. Woolf admired the nineteenth century realist writers who filled their books with the petty details of daily life, and she praised the diary of Samuel Pepys for including “the buying of clothes, the losing of tempers, and all the infinite curiosities, amusements, and pettinesses of average human life.” Such a style, she believed, had gone out of fashion in the modern era; contemporary fiction, like contemporary rooms, no longer tolerated the overstuffed, crowded appearance of the Victorian era. In her diary, though, she could indulge her taste for this older mode. Like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) or the novels of her relative William Makepeace Thackeray, her diary records daily life with all of its people and places visited, its small triumphs and little tragedies, in a manner at once immediate and crafted.

As such, it offers an intimate portrait of Virginia Woolf and her world. Even her letters, published slightly before the diaries, are less revealing, for these were intended for specific audiences, and for each reader Woolf donned a particular mask. Only in the diary was she free to speak to herself, though as the work progressed she became increasingly conscious that she was writing for other eyes as well. She paints herself, warts and all, with her prejudices, fears, and vanities but also with her courage and dedication to her art. Samuel Pepys, when forced by failing eyesight to give up his diary, lamented that the decision was “almost as much as to see myself go into my grave” because like all diarists he realized that days unrecorded would for his future self as well as for posterity be days unlived. For Woolf, too, the diary was a stay against time, a barrier between herself and death. The Woolf who emerges from these pages is not the shadowy figure who drowned herself in the River Ouse on March 28, 1941. Rather, she appears as a colorful woman who enjoyed life fully, who adhered to the creed she borrowed from Montaigne: “Its life that matters.”

Bibliography

The Atlantic. CCL, August, 1982, p. 94.

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. A remarkably objective, crisp, clear book by a nephew who also brought the skills of a teacher and artist to his task. This biography is well documented and carefully indexed, and it contains thirty-two pages of excellent photographs.

Book World. XIV, December 9, 1984, p. 1.

Booklist. LXXXI, November 15, 1984, p. 415.

Christian Science Monitor. August 4, 1982, p. 15.

Christian Science Monitor. January 23, 1985, p. 22.

The Economist. CCLXXXII, March 20, 1982, p. 97.

The Economist. CCXCCII, July 7, 1984, p. 80.

Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Unlike Bell’s biography, Gordon’s seeks to relate her subject’s life and writings. Gordon brings a woman’s eye to the psychological pain inflicted on young Virginia Stephen by the restrictions and expectations imposed by her Victorian father. Offers many feminist insights into Woolf’s fiction.

History Today. XXXIII, February, 1983, p. 60.

History Today. XXXIV, July, 1984, p. 60.

Kirkus Reviews. LII, September 1, 1984, p. 861.

Listener. CVII, March 11, 1982, p. 20.

Listener. CXII, July 5, 1984, p. 23.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. October 21, 1984, p. 2.

New Statesman. CIII, March 19, 1982, p. 30.

New Statesman. CVIII, August 3, 1984, p. 23.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII, July 11, 1982, p. 3.

The New York Review of Books. XXXI, November 8, 1984, p. 3.

The New York Times. CXXXIV, September 20, 1984, p. 21.

The New Yorker. LVIII, September 6, 1982, p. 107.

Newsweek. CIV, October 15, 1984, p. 99.

Observer. June 24, 1984, p. 20.

Spater, George, and Ian Parsons. A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Spater personally catalogued Woolf materials at the University of Sussex; Parsons was a close friend of Leonard Woolf in the years following his wife’s death. Together, they have produced a highly sympathetic but not entirely uncritical portrait, richly illustrated with photographs of the principals and an array of family documents.

Times Literary Supplement. June 25, 1982, p. 701.

Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-1980. Woolf’s letters to scores of correspondents reveal many aspects of her character, both flattering and unflattering. Among their many revelations, such as the ups and downs of her relationship with Vita Sackville-West. In their brilliance of imagination and language, the letters compare favorably with her novels.

Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Includes three autobiographical works unpublished in their author’s lifetime: her 1907 Reminiscences, a set of three papers read between 1920 and 1936 to a group of friends who called themselves the Memoir Club, and A Sketch of the Past, composed in 1939-1940. Collectively, these pieces give indications of Woolf’s view of herself from varied perspectives in time.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Reprint. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovan-ovich, 1991. A short but powerfully influential book. Woolf explains why two seemingly materialistic things—some money and a room of one’s own—are essential to a woman’s intellectual and spiritual freedom.