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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Virginia Woolf's 'A Writer's Diary' offers readers a glimpse into the mind of the acclaimed author through her personal journal entries. Delving into the thoughts, struggles, and creative processes of Woolf, the book showcases her unique literary style characterized by introspection and profound observations of human nature. Set in the early 20th century, the diary provides a valuable insight into the life of a female writer during a time when the literary world was predominantly male-dominated. Woolf's elegant prose and candid reflections make this work a compelling and intimate read for those interested in the inner workings of a writer's mind. Virginia Woolf, a prominent figure in the Bloomsbury Group and a pioneer of modernist literature, draws from her own experiences and emotions to offer a raw and unfiltered account of her daily life as a writer. Readers seeking a deeper understanding of Woolf's creative process and the challenges she faced as a female author in a patriarchal society will find 'A Writer's Diary' a captivating and enlightening exploration of artistry and introspection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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A WRITER'S DIARY
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Here is the workshop where thought becomes form, where a writer measures the day by sentences and shadows.
A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf is a curated selection of her journal entries, assembled after her death by Leonard Woolf and first published in 1953. Drawn largely from the years 1918 to 1941, these pages trace the unfolding of a working life devoted to fiction, essays, and the daily practice of attention. The premise is simple yet inexhaustible: to watch an artist at her desk, recording what she reads, plans, attempts, and revises. What emerges is neither memoir nor manual, but a record of making—provisional, candid, and constantly in dialogue with the larger world.
Its classic status rests on the clarity with which it reveals the creative process from the inside. Woolf’s modernist innovations—her sensitivity to time, consciousness, and pattern—are present here not as finished effects, but as problems to be solved and rhythms to be discovered. The book marries the intimacy of a private notebook with the authority of a major writer’s intellect, creating a text that is both documentary and literary. This dual nature has ensured its enduring place among readers who seek to understand how art is conceived, tested, and brought to life.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) wrote across a period of extraordinary cultural change, participating in the Bloomsbury Group and co-founding the Hogarth Press with Leonard Woolf in 1917. The entries collected in A Writer’s Diary concentrate on what she thought about writing as she drafted and published her books, edited proofs, and read widely. Leonard Woolf’s selection emphasizes passages that illuminate her craft. The result offers a continuous, chronological thread that follows her working years across the interwar period, showing an artist negotiating the demands of art, publishing, friendship, and the press of events without reducing any of them to anecdote.
The themes that traverse these pages are elemental: the struggle for a clear sentence, the arrangement of a day, the discipline of returning to the desk, and the way life’s noise enters the quiet of composition. Woolf is attentive to weather, mood, health, conversation, and reading—not as digressions, but as materials of art. She records the exhilarations and troughs that accompany invention, the tug between patience and impatience, and the satisfaction of form discovered. The diary becomes a ledger of attention, in which observation hardens into structure and private reflection becomes public meaning.
The book’s influence is felt in literary criticism, where it has supplied a textured account of how Woolf’s methods evolved, and in the practices of writers who look to it for models of discipline and freedom. It tempers myths about inspiration by showing labor: planning, revision, and the acceptance of trial and error. It also reframes biography by giving Woolf’s own words prominence in the story of her career. Leonard Woolf’s editorial role, explicitly aimed at illuminating her art, created a volume that stands as both source and companion to her fiction and essays, shaping how generations have read her work.
As a piece of writing, the diary exemplifies Woolf’s alert, exact prose. Entries move from the brisk to the meditative, from the concrete detail to the sudden pattern that orders it. They are not public essays polished for a magazine; they are working notes that nonetheless show the cadence and acuity recognizable throughout her oeuvre. The effect is intimate without being confessional. The voice we hear is practical and exploratory, weighing ideas, registering impressions, and testing forms, so that the reader can recognize the texture of thinking as it occurs in real time.
The diary also charts a social and professional world. We see the obligations of running a press, the logistics of publishing, the conversations of friends and fellow artists, and the reciprocal energies of reading and being read. Yet, however public the context, the entries return to solitude at the desk, to the ritual of work that holds the center. This interplay between community and privacy underlines the diary’s durability: it speaks to anyone who balances the claims of a life with the concentration art requires.
Situated amid the upheavals of early twentieth-century Britain, these pages register how large events and daily contingencies shape a writer’s practice. The diary does not aim to be a comprehensive chronicle of its times, but it witnesses them in glances and pressures that touch the work. The rhythms of London and the weather of the English countryside, the tempo of publishing seasons, and the shifting conversation of modernism all leave their mark. In this way, the book preserves an atmosphere—the feel of an era—against which Woolf’s experiments take their bearings.
For readers and writers alike, A Writer’s Diary has become a touchstone for understanding persistence, failure, and the exhilaration of discovery. Scholars consult it to ground interpretations; practitioners consult it to calibrate a day’s work. Because it is selective, it maintains a clarity of focus that many enormous journals cannot: every entry gathers toward the question of how to make a book, an essay, a paragraph. Its steady attention to process offers a counterweight to the mythology of genius, substituting habit, curiosity, and vision patiently earned.
Newcomers to Woolf will find here a lucid entrance to her sensibility, while seasoned readers will recognize familiar preoccupations seen from a fresh angle. The diary stands on its own as literature—a sequence of scenes and thoughts that cohere into an education in craft—even as it deepens the experience of reading her novels and essays. It invites a mode of reading that is cumulative and reflective, in which each entry refracts the last, and the whole accretes into an image of artistic life that is complex, humane, and practical.
Today, when attention is scattered and the conditions of creative labor are ever in flux, this book’s counsel is newly resonant. It offers a model of sustained curiosity and flexible discipline, showing how to protect a space for thought without turning away from the world. Its themes—time, work, community, and the shape of a life in art—remain urgent. A Writer’s Diary endures because it honors both rigor and freedom, reminding us that literature is an everyday practice whose rewards, still, arrive sentence by sentence.
Synopsis
A Writer's Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf and first published in 1953, presents a curated sequence of Virginia Woolf’s diary entries from 1918 to 1941, selected to illuminate her life as a working writer. Arranged chronologically, the extracts trace how projects emerge, stall, and find form, while also recording reading, reviewing, and the practicalities of publication. The editor’s focus keeps attention on composition rather than private gossip, so the book reads as an informal craft notebook shaped by daily life. Without presenting a single argument, the entries collectively outline Woolf’s evolving artistic aims, the pressures that accompany them, and the conditions under which her major works took shape.
Early entries depict the aftermath of the First World War and Woolf’s determination to move beyond conventional narrative techniques. She notes experiments in voice and structure that will lead to Jacob’s Room, balancing long stretches of drafting with the demands of the Hogarth Press she ran with Leonard Woolf. Reading widely and writing reviews, she tests approaches that might sustain a new kind of novel, attending to rhythm, pattern, and the texture of ordinary days. The tone alternates between confidence and uncertainty as she refines routines—walking, note-taking, revising—that support endurance, and begins to articulate the standards by which she will judge her own modernist ambitions.
As the diary advances into the mid-1920s, entries track the conception and making of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Woolf wrestles with how to represent time, memory, and the circulation of thought without sacrificing clarity or momentum. She experiments with structural frames that can hold crowded interiors and the movement of a single day, and reflects on the relation between private feeling and social setting. Drafts expand and contract through repeated revisions; reception by trusted readers is weighed, but not allowed to dictate direction. The entries show method becoming belief: a conviction that form must evolve to reflect experience as it is actually lived.
By the later 1920s, the diary turns to Orlando and to the essays and lectures that feed into The Common Reader and A Room of One’s Own. Woolf records a new playfulness with biography, history, and gender, and considers how satire can open paths closed to solemn argument. She also gauges the public demands of speaking and publishing against the inwardness fiction requires, testing whether intellectual positions can coexist with artistic freedom. The Hogarth Press remains a backdrop of proofs, jackets, and correspondence, and the entries measure both exhilaration and fatigue as she negotiates the different kinds of authority expected from a novelist and essayist.
The Waves concentrates the aesthetic risks she has been courting, and the diary shows its arduous evolution. Woolf seeks a design of interlaced voices and patterned interludes that might approach the movement of consciousness without being formless. She experiments with cadence, image, and perspective, often abandoning large sections to discover a more integral shape. The entries register alternating surges of confidence and doubt, the physical strain of sustained attention, and the small practical adjustments that keep the work advancing. Publication brings relief but not closure; the diary preserves her sense that each finished book is also an opening toward further technical problems.
Through the 1930s, the entries follow multiple, diverging projects. A plan to merge fiction and argument under the working scheme later known as The Pargiters is gradually split, yielding the separate undertakings of The Years and Three Guineas. Woolf debates how directly to address social and political conflict, mindful of voice, evidence, and the risks of polemic. Alongside these weightier concerns, she pursues the lighter experiment of Flush, reflecting on form from a different angle. The world darkens, and the diary notes the press of events beyond literature, yet the entries return to questions of structure, pacing, and proportion as the means by which art can respond.
Interwoven with project notes are portraits of a working milieu: conversations with friends and fellow writers, visits, readings, and reactions to new books. The Hogarth Press recurs as both support and constraint, its schedules and finances shaping what can be attempted. Woolf gauges reviews and letters from readers without surrendering critical independence, and she inventories the resources—time, quiet, health—on which sustained composition depends. The diary does not seek confession; it records a professional life tested daily by choices about form, subject, and labor. The cumulative impression is of method forged in community yet guarded by solitude, attentive to both experiment and craft.
In the final years covered, the diary chronicles work on the biography of Roger Fry and the encroachment of war. London life is punctuated by alarms and dislocation, and periods in the country offer only partial relief. Woolf continues to plan, draft, and revise, measuring what a writer can responsibly say as public danger rises. She documents shortages, interruptions, and the altered texture of days, while keeping faith with habits that make writing possible. The entries weigh the claims of fact and imagination in biography, the uses of criticism, and the resilience of style under pressure, without yielding the private energy that had sustained earlier books.
Taken together, these extracts present a sustained self-education in making literature: a record of inquiry, discipline, and recalibration under changing historical weather. A Writer’s Diary does not offer a theory of fiction so much as a lived sequence of problems posed and solved at the desk. It clarifies how Woolf’s major works were conceived and revised, how reading and conversation informed them, and how publishing realities framed their emergence. Without revealing private drama beyond what is relevant to craft, the book endures as a guide to artistic persistence, asking what forms can carry contemporary life and how a writer can responsibly widen those forms.
Historical Context
A Writer’s Diary collects Virginia Woolf’s journal entries largely from the late 1910s through early 1941, written between London and the Sussex countryside at Monk’s House. They unfold within a Britain governed by a constitutional monarchy and a powerful civil service, with the British Empire still expansive though increasingly strained. Class hierarchies, the Anglican establishment, Oxbridge academia, and a London-centered publishing world structured public life. The diary’s vantage—private, experimental, and often literary—situates Woolf amid these dominant institutions while she negotiates her roles as novelist, essayist, publisher, and member of an artistic circle positioned both within and against metropolitan cultural authority.
The First World War (1914–1918) and its immediate aftermath form the work’s opening historical horizon. Britain emerged victorious yet deeply shaken by mass casualties, economic dislocation, and mourning rituals that suffused daily life. The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic compounded grief and uncertainty. Woolf’s entries, resuming in the later war years and intensifying after, register the social disillusionment that pervaded interwar Britain. Her reflections on memory, trauma, and public commemoration echo the wider reckoning with shell shock, loss, and the strained heroism of wartime narratives, while she considers how a modern prose might incorporate fractured perception and the pressures of public remembrance.
The Bloomsbury Group—writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered from the 1900s onward—shaped Woolf’s intellectual milieu. Figures such as Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant challenged Victorian moral codes, championed aesthetic innovation, and debated ethics, economics, and sexuality. Many had roots in Cambridge networks like the Apostles, which prized rigorous, candid conversation. The diary captures the informal institutions Bloomsbury built—studios, salons, friendships—that rivaled conventional cultural authorities. Its notes on companionship, disagreement, and taste make the circle’s anti-dogmatic ethos and skepticism of militarism and imperial prestige visible in the texture of everyday talk.
Publishing was both Woolf’s livelihood and her laboratory. In 1917 she and Leonard Woolf founded the Hogarth Press, initially hand-printing at home before expanding into a distinctive modernist imprint. The Press issued early works by Katherine Mansfield (including Prelude in 1918), the British edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1923), and, from the mid-1920s, translations of Sigmund Freud in collaboration with the psychoanalytic movement. The diary registers the practical burdens—typesetting, contracts, readers’ responses—through which new writing reached the public, showing how small presses contested commercial conservatism and censorship while incubating experimental prose and poetry.
Expanding women’s rights reshaped Woolf’s world. The Representation of the People Act (1918) enfranchised many women over 30; the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act (1919) widened access to professions; Oxford granted women degrees in 1920; full voting parity arrived in 1928. Cambridge withheld full degrees for women until 1948, a reminder of institutional lag. Woolf’s diary often shadows the thinking behind A Room of One’s Own (1929) and later essays, exploring income, space, and education as preconditions for creativity. Her notes on lectures, libraries, and the economics of authorship test the cultural claims of equality against the enduring practices of patriarchal gatekeeping.
Modernism’s ascent provides the artistic frame. Across the 1910s–1930s, writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Marcel Proust reconfigured narrative time, interiority, and literary form. Woolf’s diary records her craft problems—voice, perspective, rhythm—while weighing contemporaries’ innovations and the periodical culture that broadcast them. The entries witness a pivot from Victorian realism toward techniques attentive to consciousness and social flux. They also document the material scenes of modernism—readers’ clubs, lectures, reviews, and small rooms crowded with proofs—through which experimental literature entered general discussion and met resistance.
Interwar Britain weathered unstable growth, a postwar slump, and the 1926 General Strike, followed by shocks from the 1929 financial crisis. Unemployment, regional disparities, and debates over welfare policy defined public argument. The diary, attentive to prices, servants’ availability, and the strains of household economies, traces the lived registers of macroeconomics. Woolf observes poverty in London streets and provincial towns and sifts these impressions into her thinking about class and national character. The entries foreshadow the sociological textures of her fiction and essays, measuring subtle shifts in status, work, and respectability under pressure.
Changes in domestic and media technology altered everyday rhythms. Urban electrification, the spread of telephones, and increased motor traffic refashioned pace and noise. The British Broadcasting Corporation, founded in 1922, made wireless listening a common habit and created new audiences for talks and readings; Woolf herself delivered radio talks in the 1930s. The diary notes interruptions, pleasures, and irritations introduced by devices, schedules, and transport links between London and Sussex. It also shows how modern publicity—reviews, radio chatter, circulating libraries—could amplify or distort the reception of serious writing in a newly mass, mediated culture.
Contemporary medicine and psychiatry provide another axis of context. Early twentieth-century British treatments for mental illness emphasized rest, routine, and observation; effective pharmacological interventions were limited. Woolf experienced recurring periods of severe mental distress across her adult life, and the diary preserves a record of oscillation between productivity and debility within prevailing therapeutic regimes. The entries reveal a negotiated regimen of quiet, walking, reading, and work, assisted by family vigilance. They also offer a rare account of how a working writer adapted her schedule in an era when stigma and limited medical understanding shaped both care and self-conception.
Debates over sexuality and censorship intensified in the 1920s. Obscenity prosecutions targeted avant-garde and queer representation: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was banned in Britain in 1928; James Joyce’s Ulysses faced bans and seizures before UK availability widened in the mid-1930s. The diary reflects an atmosphere in which libel law and moral campaigns constrained publishers, reviewers, and writers’ candor. Within Bloomsbury, same-sex relationships and unconventional domestic arrangements were common knowledge, though discretion remained prudent. Woolf’s notes weigh artistic frankness against legal and social penalties, situating literary form as a strategy for saying difficult things indirectly.
The British Empire’s political strains became increasingly visible. After the First World War, anticolonial movements accelerated: in India, mass civil disobedience in the 1920s–1930s and global outcry over the 1919 Amritsar massacre marked shifting legitimacy. Leonard Woolf’s earlier service in Ceylon informed the couple’s anti-imperial critiques, while Woolf’s essays interrogated the cultural bases of dominance. The diary registers headlines, speeches, and arguments that filtered into metropolitan drawing rooms, revealing how imperial news shaped domestic conversation. It frames Woolf’s skepticism of martial prestige and administrative paternalism as a response to a world-system under negotiation and strain.
European politics darkened the interwar mood. Dictatorships consolidated in Italy under Mussolini and in Germany under Hitler after 1933; antisemitic laws and violence targeted Jewish communities; the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) tested international solidarity. British debates over appeasement culminated in the 1938 Munich Agreement, initially hailed by many as peace-preserving. The diary chronicles apprehension, reports of refugees, and the bite of newspaper rhetoric. Leonard Woolf’s Jewish background and the couple’s political networks intensified awareness of fascism’s threat. Woolf’s entries weigh the responsibilities of writers in a moment when public speech risked seeming either futile or complicit.
The Second World War (1939–1945) imposed new routines: blackouts, rationing, evacuations, and civil defense. German air raids in 1940–1941—the Blitz—damaged London neighborhoods central to literary life, including bookshops, offices, and friends’ homes. The Hogarth Press faced paper shortages and disruptions. In Sussex, Woolf and Leonard followed war bulletins and prepared contingency plans amid fears of invasion. The diary records the ambient dread, sudden losses, and practical scramble of intellectual work under bombardment. Its fragments of ordinary detail—walks, weather, proofreading—stand against sirens and craters, mapping a writer’s persistence in emergency.
Visual art and criticism formed a parallel modernist revolution. Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions in 1910 and 1912 had earlier unsettled British taste, and their aftershocks continued into the 1920s and 1930s through galleries, lectures, and the Omega Workshops. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, central to Bloomsbury, developed a domestic-modern style that extended to book jackets for the Hogarth Press. The diary situates Woolf in rooms hung with experimental canvases, translating painterly questions—color, pattern, composition—into prose problems. It also shows how domestic interiors, studios, and country gardens served as semi-public spaces for discussing aesthetics and politics together.
Educational institutions remained contested terrain. While women gained footholds, Oxbridge cultures guarded prestige through rituals, fellowships, and syllabi patterned on classics and history. Adult education and workers’ institutes expanded alternatives, and literary societies proliferated. Woolf lectured at women’s colleges in 1928, work that fed into A Room of One’s Own, and kept up with reviewers and the Times Literary Supplement’s judgments. In the diary she tracks negotiations over invitations, fees, and topics, measuring the distance between democratizing ideals and the persistence of gatekeeping. Her entries render the literary field as a web of committees, common rooms, and newspapers.
A Writer’s Diary itself is a posthumous artifact shaped by editorial choices. After Woolf’s death in 1941, Leonard Woolf selected and arranged passages with an emphasis on her creative process; the volume appeared in 1953, when postwar Britain was dismantling wartime controls and reassessing modernism’s legacy. The selection foregrounds working notes on novels, essays, and public talks, and it filters personal material through a literary lens. Its reception helped introduce broader audiences to Woolf’s methods well before the full scholarly edition of her diaries appeared decades later, thus influencing mid-century understandings of modernist practice and feminist critique.
Read as historical document, the book mirrors and probes its era’s contradictions. It holds modernist techniques up to a society convulsed by war, empire’s unmaking, and the reconfiguration of gender and class. It records how technologies of print and broadcast altered attention and authority, how censorship constrained truth-telling, and how private endurance intersected with public catastrophe. Without dramatizing plot, the diary critiques institutions by logging their mundane effects on time, money, and speech. In preserving thought-in-process, it models a writer’s ethical attention to the present, asking what forms might adequately register a world remade at breakneck speed.
Author Biography
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English novelist, essayist, and critic whose experiments with narrative form helped define literary modernism. Writing across the transition from the late Victorian era to the mid-twentieth century, she developed techniques that rendered interior consciousness, shifting time, and social perception with unprecedented subtlety. A central figure within the Bloomsbury Group, she participated in a wider conversation about art, ethics, and the institutions of modern life. Her fiction and essays, at once formally innovative and intellectually rigorous, have become staples of world literature and critical study, shaping debates about the novel’s possibilities, the politics of culture, and the conditions for creative work.
Educated primarily at home and through extensive reading, Woolf also attended classes at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London in the late 1890s, studying history and classics. Early work as a reviewer, notably for the Times Literary Supplement, honed a critical voice attentive to style and form. She absorbed influences from the English essay tradition, nineteenth‑century fiction, and new European movements, while developments in the visual arts—especially Post‑Impressionism—encouraged her to reimagine representation on the page. Conversations among artists and thinkers in Bloomsbury reinforced an experimental ethos and a commitment to intellectual independence that would animate both her literary practice and her editorial ventures.
Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), introduced themes of perception, self‑knowledge, and social ritual that she would revisit throughout her career. Night and Day (1919) pursued questions of marriage and vocation, while Jacob’s Room (1922) signaled a decisive turn toward fragmentation and absence as organizing principles. In 1917 she co‑founded the Hogarth Press, which published her own books, influential poetry and criticism, and English translations of psychoanalytic writings. The press became a laboratory for typographic experiment and a vehicle for discovering and supporting contemporary voices, giving Woolf unusual autonomy over her work’s production and positioning her at the center of modernist literary networks.
Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) secured Woolf’s reputation as a leading modernist. Both novels compress external time while unfolding the depths of consciousness, refining free indirect discourse and lyrical interior monologue. Orlando (1928) playfully traverses centuries and interrogates the making of identity, authorship, and history. With The Waves (1931), she pursued radical form through interwoven soliloquies, distilling voices into pattern and rhythm. Across these works, Woolf balanced social observation with formal daring, probing memory, desire, mortality, and the structures of everyday life. Critics increasingly recognized the coherence of her innovations, even as debates persisted about accessibility and experiment.
An exceptional essayist, Woolf advanced a distinctive critical method grounded in sympathetic reading and historical context. The Common Reader (1925) and The Common Reader: Second Series (1932) survey literature from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century with wit and clarity. A Room of One’s Own (1929) argued that women writers require material security and institutional access to create, articulating a powerful case for intellectual and economic independence. Three Guineas (1938) extended this critique to education, employment, and militarism, linking authoritarian structures to cultural inequities. Through lectures, reviews, and editorial work at the Hogarth Press, she shaped public discourse on literature, culture, and gender.
In the 1930s Woolf balanced ambition with unease about political crisis. The Years (1937) was her most commercially successful novel, mapping the pressures of social change across generations. Between the Acts, published in 1941, meditates on art, history, and community in the shadow of war. Throughout her life she experienced recurrent periods of mental illness, which intensified amid the upheavals of the era and the destruction of the Second World War. In 1941 she died by suicide in southern England. The publication of her diaries and essays has since illuminated her artistic processes and clarified the breadth of her critical engagement.
Woolf’s legacy is enduring and global. Her formal innovations transformed the novel’s treatment of time and consciousness, influencing writers across languages and generations. Her feminist arguments continue to frame discussions of authorship, education, and cultural power, while works like Orlando have become touchstones in debates about gender and identity. As an editor and publisher, she helped shape modernist canons and professional pathways for new writing. Ongoing scholarship engages her as a critic, diarist, and theorist of reading, and adaptations for stage and screen renew her presence in public culture. Her work remains central to literary study and contemporary creative practice.
A WRITER'S DIARY
1918.
Monday, August 5th.
While waiting to buy a book in which to record my impressions first of Christina Rossetti, then of Byron, I had better write them here. For one thing I have hardly any money left, having bought Leconte de Lisle in great quantities. Christina has the great distinction of being a born poet, as she seems to have known very well herself. But if I were bringing a case against God she is one of the first witnesses I should call. It is melancholy reading. First she starved herself of love, which I meant also life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded. There were two good suitors. The first indeed had his peculiarities. He had a conscience. She could only marry a particular shade of Christian. He could only stay that shade for a few months at a time. Finally he developed Roman Catholicism and was lost. Worse still was the case of Mr Collins—a really delightful scholar—an unworldly recluse—a single-minded worshipper of Christina, who could never be brought into the fold at all. On this account she could visit him affectionately in his lodgings, which she did to the end of her life. Poetry was castrated too. She would set herself to do the psalms into verse; and to make all her poetry subservient to the Christian doctrines. Consequently, as I think, If she starved into austere emaciation a very fine original gift, which only wanted licence to take to itself a far finer form than, shall we say, Mrs Browning’s. She wrote very easily; in a spontaneous childlike kind of way one imagines, as is the case generally with a true gift; still undeveloped. She has the natural singing power. She thinks too. She has fancy. She could, one is profane enough to guess, have been ribald and witty. And, as a reward for all her sacrifices, she died in terror, uncertain of salvation. I confess though that I have only turned her poetry over, making my way inevitably to the ones I knew already.
Wednesday, August 7th.
Asheham diary drains off my meticulous observations of flowers, clouds, beetles and the price of eggs; and, being alone, there is no other event to record. Our tragedy has been the squashing of a caterpillar; our excitement the return of the servants from Lewes last night, laden with all L.’s war books and the English review for me, with Brailsford upon a League of Nations, and Katherine Mansfield on Bliss. I threw down Bliss with the exclamation, ‘She’s done for!’ Indeed I don’t see how much faith in her as woman or writer can survive that sort of story. I shall have to accept the fact, I’m afraid, that her mind is a very thin soil, laid an inch or two deep upon very barren rock. For Bliss is long enough to give her a chance of going deeper. Instead she is content with superficial smartness; and the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an interesting mind. She writes badly too. And the effect was as I say, to give me an impression of her callousness and hardness as a human being. I shall read it again; but I don’t suppose I shall change. She’ll go on doing this sort of thing, perfectly to her and Murry’s satisfaction. I’m relieved now that they didn’t come. Or is it absurd to read all this criticism of her personally into a story?
Anyhow I was very glad to go on with my Byron. He has at least the male virtues. In fact, I’m amused to find how easily I can imagine the effect he had upon women—especially upon rather stupid or uneducated women, unable to stand up to him. So many, too, would wish to reclaim him. Ever since I was a child (as Gertler would say, as if it proved him a particularly remarkable person) I’ve had the habit of getting full of some biography and wanting to build up my imaginary figure of the person with every scrap of news I could find about him. During the passion, the name of Cowper or Byron or whoever it might be, seemed to start up in the most unlikely pages. And then, suddenly, the figure becomes distant and merely one of the usual dead. I’m much impressed by the extreme badness of B.’s poetry—such of it as Moore quotes with almost speechless admiration. Why did they think this Album stuff the finest fire of poetry? It reads hardly better than L.E.L[1]. or Ella Wheeler Wilcox. And they dissuaded him from doing what he knew he could do, which was to write satire. He came home from the East with satires (parodies of Horace) in his bag and Childe Harold. He was persuaded that Childe Harold was the best poem ever written. But he never as a young man believed in his poetry; a proof, in such a confident dogmatic person, that he hadn’t the gift. The Wordsworths and Keats’ believe in that as much as they believe in anything. In his character, I’m often reminded a little of Rupert Brooke, though this is to Rupert’s disadvantage. At any rate Byron had superb force; his letters prove it. He had in many ways a very fine nature too; though as no one laughed him out of his affectations he became more like Horace Cole than one could wish. He could only be laughed at by a woman, and they worshipped instead. I haven’t yet come to Lady Byron, but I suppose, instead of laughing, she merely disapproved. And so he became Byronic.
Friday, August 9th.
In the absence of human interest, which makes us peaceful and content, one may as well go on with Byron. Having indicated that I am ready, after a century, to fall in love with him, I suppose my judgment of Don Juan may be partial. It is the most readable poem of its length ever written, I suppose: a quality which it owes in part to the springy random haphazard galloping nature of its method. This method is a discovery by itself. It’s what one has looked for in vain—an elastic shape which will hold whatever you choose to put into it. Thus he could write out his mood as it came to him; he could say whatever came into his head. He wasn’t committed to be poetical; and thus escaped his evil genius of the false romantic and imaginative. When he is serious he is sincere: and he can impinge upon any subject he likes. He writes 16 cantos without once flogging his flanks. He had, evidently, the able witty mind of what my father Sir Leslie would have called a thoroughly masculine nature. I maintain that these illicit kinds of book are far more interesting than the proper books which respect illusions devoutly all the time. Still, it doesn’t seem an easy example to follow; and indeed like all free and easy things, only the skilled and mature really bring them off successfully. But Byron was full of ideas—a quality that gives his verse a toughness and drives me to little excursions over the surrounding landscape or room in the middle of my reading. And tonight I shall have the pleasure of finishing him—though why considering that I’ve enjoyed almost every stanza, this should be a pleasure I really don’t know. But so it always is, whether the book’s a good book or a bad book. Maynard Keynes admitted in the same way that he always cuts off the advertisements at the end with one hand while he’s reading, so as to know exactly how much he has to get through.
Monday, August 19th.
I finished by the way the Electra of Sophocles, which has been dragging on down here, though it’s not so fearfully difficult after all. The thing that always impresses me fresh is the superb nature of the story. It seems hardly possible not to make a good play of it. This perhaps is the result of having traditional plots which have been made and improved and freed from superfluities by the polish of innumerable actors and authors and critics, till it becomes like a lump of glass worn smooth in the sea. Also, if everyone in the audience knows beforehand what is going to happen, much finer and subtler touches will tell, and words can be spared. At any rate my feeling always is that one can’t read too carefully, or attach enough weight to every line and hint; and that the apparent bareness is only on the surface. There does, however, remain the question of reading the wrong emotions into the text. I am generally humiliated to find how much Jebb is able to see; my only doubt is whether he doesn’t see too much—as I think one might do with a bad modern English play if one set to work. Finally, the particular charm of Greek remains as strong and as difficult to account for as ever. One feels the immeasurable difference between the text and the translation with the first words. The heroic woman is much the same in Greece and England. She is of the type of Emily Brontë. Clytaemnestra and Electra are clearly mother and daughter, and therefore should have some sympathy, though perhaps sympathy gone wrong breeds the fiercest hate. E. is the type of woman who upholds the family above everything; the father. She has more veneration for tradition than the sons of the house; feels herself born of the father’s side and not of the mother’s. It’s strange to notice how although the conventions are perfectly false and ridiculous, they never appear petty or undignified as our English conventions are constantly made to do. Electra lived a far more hedged in life than the women of the mid-Victorian age, but this has no effect upon her, except in making her harsh and splendid. She could not go out for a walk alone; with us it would be a case of a maid and a hansom cab.
Tuesday, September 10th.
Though I am not the only person in Sussex who reads Milton, I mean to write down my impressions of Paradise Lost while I am about it. Impressions fairly well describes the sort of thing left in my mind. I have left many riddles unread. I have slipped on too easily to taste the full flavour. However I see, and agree to some extent in believing, that this full flavour is the reward of highest scholarship. I am struck by the extreme difference between this poem and any other. It lies, I think, in the sublime aloofness and impersonality of the emotion. I have never read Cowper on the sofa, but I can imagine that the sofa is a degraded substitute for Paradise Lost. The substance of Milton is all made of wonderful, beautiful and masterly descriptions of angels’ bodies, battles, flights, dwelling places. He deals in horror and immensity and squalor and sublimity but never in the passions of the human heart. Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one’s own joys and sorrows? I get no help in judging life; I scarcely feel that Milton lived or knew men and women; except for the peevish personalities about marriage and the woman’s duties. He was the first of the masculinists, but his disparagement rises from his own ill luck and seems even a spiteful last word in his domestic quarrels. But how smooth, strong and elaborate it all is! What poetry! I can conceive that even Shakespeare after this would seem a little troubled, personal, hot and imperfect. I can conceive that this is the essence, of which almost all other poetry is the dilution. The inexpressible fineness of the style, in which shade after shade is perceptible, would alone keep one gazing into it, long after the surface business in progress has been despatched. Deep down one catches still further combinations, rejections, felicities and masteries. Moreover, though there is nothing like Lady Macbeth’s terror or Hamlet’s cry, no pity or sympathy or intuition, the figures are majestic; in them is summed up much of what men thought of our place in the universe, of our duty to God, our religion.
1919.
Monday, January 20th.
I mean to copy this out when I can buy a book, so I omit the flourishes proper to the new year. It is not money this time that I lack, but the capacity, after a fortnight in bed, to make the journey to Fleet Street[2]. Even the muscles of my right hand feel as I imagine a servant’s hand to feel. Curiously enough, I have the same stiffness in manipulating sentences, though by rights I should be better equipped mentally now than I was a month ago. The fortnight in bed was the result of having a tooth out, and being tired enough to get a headache—a long dreary affair, that receded and advanced much like a mist on a January day. One hour’s writing daily is my allowance for the next few weeks; and having hoarded it this morning I may spend part of it now, since L. is out and I am much behindhand with the month of January. I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year’s diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles. Still if it were not written rather faster than the fastest typewriting, if I stopped and took thought, it would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated but which are the diamonds of the dustheap[1q]. If Virginia Woolf at the age of 50, when she sits down to build her memoirs out of these books, is unable to make a phrase as it should be made, I can only condole with her and remind her of the existence of the fireplace, where she has my leave to burn these pages to so many black films with red eyes in them. But how I envy her the task I am preparing for her! There is none I should like better. Already my 37th birthday next Saturday is robbed of some of its terrors by the thought. Partly for the benefit of this elderly lady (no subterfuges will then be possible: 50 is elderly, though I anticipate her protest and agree that it is not old) partly to give the year a solid foundation I intend to spend the evenings of this week of captivity in making out an account of my friendships and their present condition, with some account of my friends’ characters; and to add an estimate of their work and a forecast of their future works. The lady of 50 will be able to say how near to the truth I come; but I have written enough for tonight (only 15 minutes, I see).
Wednesday, March 5th.
Just back from four days at Asheham and one at Charleston[3]. I sit waiting for Leonard to come in, with a brain still running along the railway lines, which unfits it for reading. But oh, dear, what a lot I’ve got to read! The entire works of Mr James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, so as to compare them with the entire works of Dickens and Mrs Gaskell; besides that George Eliot; and finally Hardy. And I’ve just done Aunt Anny, on a really liberal scale. Yes, since I wrote last she has died, a week ago today to be precise, at Freshwater, and was buried up at Hampstead yesterday, where six or seven years ago we saw Richmond buried in a yellow fog. I suppose my feeling for her is half moonshine; or rather half reflected from other feelings. Father cared for her; she goes down the last, almost, of that old 19th Century Hyde Park Gate world. Unlike most old ladies she showed very little anxiety to see one; felt, I sometimes think, a little painfully at the sight of us, as if we’d gone far off and recalled unhappiness, which she never liked to dwell on. Also, unlike most old Aunts she had the wits to feel how sharply we differed on current questions; and this, perhaps, gave her a sense, hardly existing with her usual circle, of age, obsoleteness, extinction. For myself, though she need have had no anxieties on this head, since I admired her sincerely; but still the generations certainly look very different ways. Two or perhaps three years ago L. and I went to see her; found her much diminished in size, wearing a feather boa round her neck and seated alone in a drawing room almost the copy, on a smaller scale, of the old drawing room; the same subdued pleasant air of the 18th Century and old portraits and old china. She had our tea waiting for us. Her manner was a little distant, and more than a little melancholy. I asked her about father, and she said how those young men laughed in a ‘loud melancholy way’ and how their generation was a very happy one, but selfish; and how ours seemed to her fine but very terrible; but we hadn’t any writers such as they had. ‘Some of them have just a touch of that quality; Bernard Shaw has; but only a touch. The pleasant thing was to know them all as ordinary people, not great men.’ And then a story of Carlyle and father; Carlyle saying he’d as soon wash his face in a dirty puddle as write journalism. She put her hand down, I remember, into a bag or box standing beside the fire, and said she had a novel, three quarters written, but couldn’t finish it. Nor do I suppose it ever was finished; but I’ve said all I can say, dressing it up a trifle rosily, in The Times tomorrow. I have written to Hester, but how I doubt the sincerity of my own emotion!
Wednesday, March 19th.
Thursday, March 27th.
… Night and Day which L. has spent the past two mornings and evenings in reading. I own that his verdict, finally pronounced this morning, gives me immense pleasure: how far one should discount it, I don’t know. In my own opinion N. & D. is a much more mature and finished and satisfactory book than The Voyage Out; as it has reason to be. I suppose I lay myself open to the charge of niggling with emotions that don’t really matter. I certainly don’t anticipate even two editions. And yet I can’t help thinking that, English fiction being what it is, I compare for originality and sincerity rather well with most of the moderns. L. finds the philosophy very melancholy. It too much agrees with what he was saying yesterday. Yet, if one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one. Still, if you think of it, what answers do Arnold Bennett or Thackeray, for instance, suggest? Happy ones—satisfactory solutions—answers one would accept, if one had the least respect for one’s soul? Now I have done my last odious piece of typewriting, and when I have scribbled this page, I shall write and suggest Monday as the day for coming up to lunch with Gerald. I don’t suppose I’ve ever enjoyed any writing so much as I did the last half of Night and Day. Indeed, no part of it taxed me as The Voyage Out did; and if one’s own ease and interest promise anything good, I should have hopes that some people, at least, will find it a pleasure. I wonder if I shall ever be able to read it again? Is the time coming when I can endure to read my own writing in print without blushing—shivering and wishing to take cover?
Wednesday, April 2nd.
Yesterday I took Night and Day up to Gerald and had a little half domestic half professional interview with him in his office. I don’t like the Clubman’s view of literature. For one thing it breeds in me a violent desire to boast: I boasted of Nessa and Clive and Leonard; and how much money they made. Then we undid the parcel and he liked the title but found that Miss Maud Annesley has a book called Nights and Days—which may make difficulties with Mudies[4]. But he was certain he would wish to publish it; and we were altogether cordial; and I noticed how his hair is every blade of it white, with some space between the blades; a very sparsely sown field. I had tea at Gordon Square.
Saturday, April 12th.
These ten minutes are stolen from Moll Flanders, which I failed to finish yesterday in accordance with my time sheet, yielding to a desire to stop reading and go up to London. But I saw London, in particular the view of white city churches and palaces from Hungerford Bridge through the eyes of Defoe. I saw the old women selling matches through his eyes; and the draggled girl skirting round the pavement of St James’s Square seemed to me out of Roxana or Moll Flanders. Yes, a great writer surely to be there imposing himself on me after 200 years. A great writer—and Forster has never read his books! I was beckoned by Forster from the Library as I approached. We shook hands very cordially; and yet I always feel him shrinking sensitively from me, as a woman, a clever woman, an up to date woman. Feeling this I commanded him to read Defoe, and left him, and went and got some more Defoe, having bought one volume at Bickers on the way.
Thursday, April 17th.
However one may abuse the Stracheys their minds remain a source of joy to the end; so sparkling, definite and nimble. Need I add that I reserve the qualities I most admire for people who are not Stracheys? It is so long since I have seen Lytton that I take my impression of him too much from his writing, and his paper upon Lady Hester Stanhope was not one of his best. I could fill this page with gossip about people’s articles in the Athenaeum; since I had tea with Katherine yesterday and Murry sat there mud-coloured and mute, livening only when we talked his shop. He has the jealous partiality of a parent for his offspring already. I tried to be honest, as if honesty were part of my philosophy, and said how I disliked Grantorto on whistling birds, and Lytton and so on. The male atmosphere is disconcerting to me. Do they distrust one? despise one? and if so why do they sit on the whole length of one’s visit? The truth is that when Murry says the orthodox masculine thing about Eliot, for example, belittling my solicitude to know what he said of me, I don’t knuckle under; I think what an abrupt precipice cleaves asunder the male intelligence, and how they pride themselves upon a point of view which much resembles stupidity. I find it much easier to talk to Katherine; she gives and resists as I expect her to; we cover more ground in much less time; but I respect Murry. I wish for his good opinion. Heinemann has rejected K.M.’s stories; and she was oddly hurt that Roger had not invited her to his party. Her hard composure is much on the surface.
Easter Sunday, April 20th.
In the idleness which succeeds any long article, and Defoe is the second leader this month, I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough and random style of it, often so ungrammatical, and crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better; and take no time over this; and forbid her to let the eye of man behold it. And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash and vigour and sometimes hits an unexpected bull’s-eye. But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea. Moreover there looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously and scrupulously, in fiction. What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think on re-reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time. But looseness quickly becomes slovenly. A little effort is needed to face a character or an incident which needs to be recorded. Nor can one let the pen write without guidance; for fear of becoming slack and untidy like Vernon Lee. Her ligaments are too loose for my taste.
Monday, May 12th.
We are in the thick of our publishing season; Murry, Eliot and myself are in the hands of the public this morning. For this reason, perhaps, I feel slightly but decidedly depressed. I read a bound copy of Kew Gardens through; having put off the evil task until it was complete. The result is vague. It seems to me slight and short; I don’t see how the reading of it impressed Leonard so much. According to him it is the best short piece I have done yet; and this judgment led me to read the Mark on the Wall and I found a good deal of fault with that. As Sydney Waterlow once said, the worst of writing is that one depends so much upon praise. I feel rather sure that I shall get none for this story; and I shall mind a little. Unpraised, I find it hard to start writing in the morning; but the dejection lasts only 30 minutes, and once I start I forget all about it. One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there; Murry and Eliot ordered, and not me; the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art. And these mists of the spirit have other causes, I expect; though they are deeply hidden. There is some ebb and flow of the tide of life which accounts for it; though what produces either ebb or flow I’m not sure.
Tuesday, June 10th.
I must use up the fifteen minutes before dinner in going on again, in order to make up the great gap. We are just in from the Club; from ordering a reprint of the Mark on the Wall at the Pelican Press; and from tea with James. His news is that Maynard in disgust at the peace terms has resigned, kicked the dust of office off him and is now an academic figure at Cambridge. But I must really sing my own praises, since I left off at the point when we came back from Asheham to find the hall table stacked, littered, with orders for Kew Gardens. They strewed the sofa and we opened them intermittently through dinner and quarrelled, I’m sorry to say, because we were both excited, and opposite tides of excitement coursed in us, and they were blown to waves by the critical blast of Charleston. All these orders—150 about, from shops and private people—come from a review in the Lit. Sup. presumably by Logan, in which as much praise was allowed me as I like to claim. And 10 days ago I was stoically facing complete failure! The pleasure of success was considerably damaged, first by our quarrel, and second by the necessity of getting some 90 copies ready, cutting covers, printing labels, glueing backs, and finally despatching, which used up all spare time and some not spare till this moment. But how success showered during those days! Gratuitously, too, I had a letter from Macmillan in New York, so much impressed by The Voyage Out that they want to read Night and Day. I think the nerve of pleasure easily becomes numb. I like little sips, but the psychology of fame is worth considering at leisure. I fancy one’s friends take the bloom off. Lytton lunched here on Saturday with the Webbs, and when I told him my various triumphs, did I imagine a little shade, instantly dispelled, but not before my rosy fruit was out of the sun. Well, I treated his triumphs in much the same way. I can’t feel gratified when he expatiates upon a copy of Eminent Victorians lined and initialled ‘M’ or ‘H’ by Mr or Mrs Asquith. Yet clearly the thought produced a comfortable glow in him. The luncheon was a success. We ate in the garden and Lytton sported very gracefully and yet with more than his old assurance over the conversation. ‘But I’m not interested in Ireland *
Saturday, July 19th.
