UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:_31 July 2007______

I, __Drew Patrick Shannon______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Ph.D. in: English and Comparative Literature

It is entitled: The Deep Old Desk: The Diary of Virginia Woolf

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: Tamar Heller______

Alison Rieke______

Michael Griffith______

______

______

The Deep Old Desk: The Diary of Virginia Woolf

by

Drew Patrick Shannon, BA, MA

A dissertation submitted in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, College of Arts and Sciences, at the University of Cincinnati, 31 July 2007 Committee Chair: Dr. Tamar Heller

2 ABSTRACT

Virginia Woolf’s diaries have traditionally been used by scholars to augment

discussion of her “real” and “major” works—the fiction and non-fiction whose

publication she supervised in her lifetime—with details of their genesis, composition, and

production. But as Quentin Bell, Woolf’s nephew and biographer, suggests, the diary

itself is a major work, able to stand alongside her fictional masterpieces To the

Lighthouse and The Waves (D1 xiii). The diary has been available nearly in its entirety for over fifteen years, and yet it is almost never considered as a text on its own. Of all of

Woolf’s work, the diary is at once her most traditional (in its reliance on the “plot” of her own life and its day-to-day form) and her most modern and experimental (in the ways in which she often shatters the traditional diary form, uses it to her own ends, and distances it from the published, grand, monolithic male diaries of the past). The six published volumes suggest broad questions about audience, authorial intention, issues of the body and embodiment, and the development of Woolf’s modernism, while allowing for an extended look at her development as a writer, reader, wife, sister, and thinker.

This project provides a comprehensive reading of the diary, and examines certain issues and themes through a series of individual “lenses” which correspond to biographical and thematic elements. Woolf once likened her diary to a “deep old desk,” and this metaphor of the desk—that solid fixture with many drawers, cubbyholes, nooks and crannies—informs my work. Much as the desk is made of compartments, my project will look at discrete themes and topics from Woolf’s diary in separate chapters, while addressing in each several overarching concerns that inform the diary as a whole.

1

2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following individuals for their support during the writing of this dissertation:

I have been fortunate to work with three outstanding professors from the University of Cincinnati as my dissertation committee. Dr. Tamar Heller, my dissertation director, is, for me, a model of scholarship and devotion to reading and teaching. Her enthusiasm for Woolf and for my project was immeasurably helpful, as were her lucid, clear, concise comments and suggestions. Dr. Alison Rieke long ago instilled in me her belief that one should always trust one’s instincts and follow one’s academic interests, whether “fashionable” or not—the best advice that an incoming graduate student could have asked for. And Michael Griffith is a true gentleman scholar and writer, with whom I’ve worked on this and many other projects, always with extreme pleasure.

For their friendship, love, encouragement, devotion, and conversational skills (hours and hours of talking about books!), I also wish to thank Kristin Czarnecki, Kirk Boyle, Rachel Zlatkin, Kelcey Parker, Elizabeth Gordon, Mark Hussey, James Schiff, Erin McGraw, Brad Payne, Max Seibert, Chad Davidson, Noah Soudrette, Michael Cunningham, Hank and Marian McCoy, my mother Sherry Baxter, Lee and Ernest Elliott, Bill Tiernan, Andy Bockhold, Michael Klaubunde, Michael Sontag, Elizabeth Bookser Barkley, Margaret McPeak, Joe Rouse, Michael Littig, Jason Cooney, and Christopher McLean. I am deeply grateful to you all.

Finally, three people deserve special mention:

Holly Alder, my favorite “partner in crime,” was always there to remind me—on those occasions when I forgot—why I love reading in the first place, and plied me with scores of children’s books and fantasy novels, which, as we both know, are the world’s best forms of escape. All that I know about telling a good story I learned from her.

Though he was half a world away, Valerio Lanzani was a constant, daily source of love and friendship in final months of working on this project. I thank him for being there. Se non fosse stato per Virginia, avremmo potuto non incontrarci mai, e questo lavoro è il minimo che possa fare per ripagarla dell’averci fatto conoscere.

And all of this work—indeed, life itself—would have been impossible without my partner, John McCoy. “But, looking for a phrase, I found none to stand beside your name.” This is for you.

3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 5 Chapter One: “What sort of diary should I like mine to be?”: Questions of Audience and Intention 17 Chapter Two: “Doing my scales”: A Writer’s Diary 46 Chapter Three: “Stay this moment”: The Diary of Virginia Woolf as a Modernist Text 141 Chapter Four: A Portable Room of One’s Own: A Woman’s Diary 174 Conclusion 203 Bibliography 207

4 Introduction: “My casual half hours after tea”

As for many children, my first experience of a diary was when I was given one as a gift for Christmas when I was eight years old. It was brown, with the word “Diary” embossed in gold on its cover, the pages edged in gold all around, and a thin metal lock, which, in retrospect, I see could have been pried open with the flimsiest of butter knives.

I began it on New Year’s day, the first blank dated page, and wrote down what I did, who

I saw, where I played. Remarkably, I kept this up nearly daily until the end of August, just after my birthday, when I must have grown tired of filling in the extremely narrow lines with the same daily drudgery. I look through it now, and read of playing Star Wars with Tommy Knox, of my grandparents’ visit to Texas from Kentucky, of the end of the school year, of swimming. What I do not read is how I idolized Tommy Knox, how my parents argued bitterly over the grandparents’ visit (my mother wanted it, my father did not), how that summer there was a partial eclipse of the sun, which we observed through folded photographic negatives, after which I worried that I’d damaged my eyesight, how it was the hottest summer in years in Austin, when eggs would fry when cracked onto the sidewalk. I remember these things, but I cannot read about them. Writing them was beyond my capacity at the age of eight, and yet when I look at the pages of the diary, I long for some better way to transport myself back there, and I resent the empty pages after August, though as I remember, the days to December continued much as the days to

August had, but for a change of weather.

By the time I reached college, my interest in diaries had progressed to the point that I began reading those that had been published. Again, like many, the first published diary I read was The Diary of Anaïs Nin, spurred by the release of the film Henry and

5 June, the first NC-17-rated movie, where I was forced to show proof of age before entering, though I was past twenty-one. I was intrigued by Nin’s voice, and found that my own diaries, which I began to keep seriously at that time in order to make sense of a failed relationship, began to be less a record of events and more a delving into my own psychology, into my own emotional territory, into fantasy. I was dismayed soon after to learn that Nin’s diaries were heavily revised, and written with publication in mind; later I was pleased that Elizabeth Podnieks, in Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of

Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin (2000), reveals that she too was “dampened by some classroom discussion which castigated Nin for being a confessional poseur, for giving us a diary which was, after all, a fake—crafted, revised, and edited for the benefit of her audience” (3). But, I began to wonder, does this matter?

Does the fact of revision, of the writing being done with one eye on the audience, affect my pleasure in Nin’s arch, melodramatic, often randy voice? As a senior in college, I took a course on “life-writing,” and studied Tristine Rainer’s The New Diary (1978).

Rainer, a protégé of Nin, argues that “[t]he diary is the only form of writing that encourages total freedom of expression. Because of its very private nature, it has remained immune to any formal rules of content, structure, or style. As a result, the diary can come closest to reproducing how people really think and how consciousness evolves”

(11). While I agreed with Rainer’s premise, I found the course itself to be something of a contradiction, for while the teacher encouraged total honesty and no self-censorship, she collected our journals, read them, and graded them. If there was something we did not wish her to read, we were to put a large red X, in pencil, across the page—she would not, she assured us, read such marked pages. Not surprisingly, there were nevertheless a

6 number of things I did not write about in that diary, nor was I able to formulate any ideas of why I might be continuing to keep my own “real” diary, the one I kept away from the classroom.

Thomas Mallon offers these thoughts on the practice of diary-keeping, and what keeping them, and rereading them, has to offer:

Insofar as they turn every experience into a personal one, keeping diaries isn’t such a good idea. But by hanging on to them one can manage to avoid sentimentalizing the past. If I’m ever tempted to wax nostalgic for December 1973, I’ve got that small brown notebook to wise me up. I also know that I have in them a thousand things to cheer me up: if I take one of them out of the cabinet I won’t have to read too many paragraphs before getting to a joke or kiss I’d forgotten about. As the volumes pile up in that cabinet I get mixed feelings. “Look at it— life!—it’s all still there!” I think. But then I realize, “It’s going fast; there’s less and less of it to live.” Even so, I’ve come to believe—and I think most diarists believe this—that the accumulated past makes the shrinking future more bearable. When I was nineteen someone told me that time was the most important word in literature. I was skeptical. What about love? What about soul? Now that some years have gone by, I’m certain she was right. Time is the strongest thing of all, and the diarist is always fleeing it. He knows that he will eventually be run to earth, but his hope is that his book will let each day live beyond its midnight, let it continue somewhere outside its place in a finite row of falling dominoes. Even people who don’t keep diaries proper sometimes can’t bear to part with their peculiar versions of them. In Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood’s landlady, Fräulein Schroeder, liked to draw attention to her carpet and walls and point out which past lodger made which mark on it—whose coffee that was, whose ink. My father never kept a diary, but he never threw away a canceled check, either. When he died a few years ago I came across thousands of them in perfect order in a series of shoeboxes. Amidst stacks of others that took the family from the children’s milk through his own bifocals, I found the one that paid the doctor who delivered me. My father knew they didn’t audit you for 1951 in 1980; he kept those checks for another reason. (xv)

Podnieks notes that the diary is often seen as a specifically female form,1 and indeed, I realized that most of the diaries I had read were those of women. Even the fictional diaries were by women: Anna Wulf, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s The Golden

1 See Daily Modernism, Chapter Two, “That profoundly female, and feminist, genre,” pages 45-70, for a thorough examination of the gender issues surrounding diaries.

7 Notebook (1962), had long since inspired me to stop keeping separate notebooks on separate topics, but to carry around one huge book, with everything in it. Mary Jane

Moffat, co-editor of Revelations: Diaries of Women (1974), speculates as to why women keep diaries with such regularity:

Why do women keep diaries? (Or journals or notebooks.) Dissatisfaction with the ways love and work have been defined for the female is the unconscious impulse that prompts many to pour out their feelings on paper and to acquire the habit of personal accounting on some more or less regular basis. The form has been an important outlet for women partly because it is an analogue to their lives: emotional, fragmentary, interrupted, modest, not to be taken seriously, private, restricted, daily, trivial, formless, concerned with self, as endless as their tasks. Confusion about the conflicting demands of love and work in relationship to the authentic self leads to loneliness, by far the most common emotion expressed in diaries; loneliness stemming either from physical isolation from normal outlets for discourse, as with Anne Frank, or from psychological alienation from one’s milieu, as with Fanny Kemble, or from lovelessness, as with George Sand. (5)

When I began studying Virginia Woolf’s life and work in the mid-1990s, I began where most people do: with the fiction, before progressing on to the essays. I worked my way through her books chronologically, only dipping into the letters and diaries on occasion (though I owned complete sets of both, thanks to a perceptive friend who gave them to me as a gift, sensing that I would need them) to augment my understanding of what I then thought of (I am embarrassed to admit it) as her “real” work. My attitude, which I have since, obviously, shed, is perplexing to me, for I always thought of Nin’s diary as her “real” work. My only explanation is that Nin’s reputation rests largely on her diary, and not on her fiction; the reverse is true for Woolf. I had been conditioned, in a sense, by academia to treat Woolf’s diary as secondary, and to treat Nin’s diary (when it is treated by academia at all) as primary. It was not until I had exhausted Woolf’s “real” work, and was still hungry for more, that I turned to Woolf’s diaries in earnest. I quickly found myself enraptured by the voice on the page, and slipped at once into a life lived six

8 decades before my birth. This was not at all like Nin’s diary, which I had begun to recognize as the masquerade that it often is; this, I felt, was the real thing, an honest and perceptive account of a life lived moment by moment. Even when I came to realize that there is much evasion in the diary of Virginia Woolf, I still could not help feeling that I was being told a truth: one particular woman’s truth.

As of this writing, the diary of Virginia Woolf has been available nearly in its entirety for over fifteen years—five volumes, covering the years 1915 to 1941 and edited and extensively annotated by Anne Olivier Bell, were published from 1977 to 1984; the early journals from 1897 to 1909, edited and annotated by Mitchell A. Leaska, appeared in 1990—has even been excerpted as composer Dominick Argento’s From the Diary of

Virginia Woolf (a song cycle written for Janet Baker, which won the Pulitzer Prize in

1975), and yet it is almost never considered as a text on its own. Given the sheer volume of scholarly books and articles on the life and work of Virginia Woolf—part of what

Regina Marler calls the “Bloomsbury Boom”—I was surprised to find that there is to date no book-length critical study of the diary. As Elizabeth Podnieks notes, the diary of

Virginia Woolf “remains a classic illustration of how diaries have been traditionally mined for information about the lives of the famous and for insights into how their authors’ ‘real’ literature may have been conceived and developed. If Woolf is a major writer, her diary has remained a minor text” (98). A search in the MLA bibliography yields only a handful of critical articles, conference presentations, book chapters, and portions of unpublished dissertations. And yet nearly every scholar working on Woolf turns to the diaries for assistance in discussing her “real” and “major” works—the fiction and non-fiction whose publication she supervised in her lifetime—and plunder them for

9 details about their genesis, composition, and production. But as Quentin Bell, Woolf’s

nephew and biographer, suggests, the diary itself is a major work, able to stand alongside

her fictional masterpieces To the Lighthouse and The Waves (D1 xiii). Of all of Woolf’s

work, the diary is at once her most traditional (in its reliance on the “plot” of her own life

and its day-to-day form) and her most modern and experimental (in the ways in which

she often shatters the traditional diary form, uses it to her own ends, and distances it from

the published, grand, monolithic male diaries of the past). The six published volumes

(along with a recently discovered notebook with sketches of a diarizing character,

published as Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches, edited by David Bradshaw, with an

introduction by Doris Lessing [2002]) suggest broad questions about audience, authorial

intention, issues of the body, and the development of Woolf’s modernism, while allowing

for an extended look at her development as a writer, reader, wife, sister, thinker, and even

“madwoman.”

It is my intention in this project to provide a comprehensive reading of the diary,

to examine certain issues and themes through a series of individual “lenses” which

correspond to biographical and thematic elements. My title comes from Woolf’s own

famous description of her own, ideal diary:

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & 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 & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, & yet steady, tranquil composed with the aloofness of a work of art. (D1 266)

The metaphor of the desk—that solid fixture with many drawers, cubbyholes, nooks and crannies—informs my work. Much as the desk is made of compartments, this project

10 will examine discrete themes and topics from Woolf’s diary in individual sections and chapters, while addressing in each several overarching concerns that inform the diary as a whole. This subdivision of the diary was suggested by Leonard Woolf himself. In 1953 he published excerpts from his wife’s journal as A Writer’s Diary, and included in it only those passages relating to “the books she was writing or about future books which she intended to write,” as well as comments on reading, and extracts “in which she is obviously using the diary as a method of practising the art of writing” (AWD xiii). One questions whether or not there was anything in Woolf’s life “unconnected” to her writing, but Leonard’s utilization of the “lens” of her formal writing through which to view the diary led me to the idea that there are in fact many distinct diaries within the diary of

Virginia Woolf. If one can have a “writer’s diary,” one can just as easily have a “sister’s diary,” a “wife’s diary,” a “ ‘madwoman’s’ diary,” a “woman’s diary,” etc. With these categories in mind, I began mapping Virginia Woolf’s diary, looking for instances in which she discussed each thread or topic, and thus to trace its development through the work as a whole. I began to examine the ways in which Woolf uses the diary to evaluate these roles, topics, situations, or issues, how she shapes her own responses to herself and to the outside world, and how her writing in the diary on these topics is expressed, repressed, or moved intact into her published works.

Chapter One addresses broad questions of audience and intention. At first, the possibility of an audience for a diary may seem perplexing, because diaries are, as currently understood, private documents. But anyone who has ever written a diary knows that there is always an audience, whether it is merely one’s future self, some future, unnamed, faceless reader, or the people with whom you live, who may stumble upon

11 your book, or—worse—seek it out deliberately. Such questions drastically affect the ways in which the diary is written, and thus they must be asked in the case of Virginia

Woolf, who often uses her diary to address this very issue. She writes “for my own eye only” and gives her future self leave never “to let the eye of man behold it” (D1 266).

But the eye of a least one man—her husband, Leonard Woolf—did behold it: “L. has promised to add his page when he has something to say” (D1 55), and there are two entries in his hand. This chapter discusses the ways in which Leonard was or was not the audience for the diary, and speculates on the very vexing question of where precisely

Woolf kept the diary’s volumes. Keeping the diary in a locked box in a closet is different than keeping it in a drawer, which in turn is different than keeping it out on one’s worktable. While there is no definitive answer to the question, I examine the internal evidence of the diaries themselves and speculate as to what this might have meant in terms of Woolf’s conception of audience. In addition, the chapter examines Woolf’s possible intentions for the material produced in “my casual half hours after tea” (D1 266).

“[O]h yes,” she says on 3 February 1927, “I shall write my memoirs out of them, one of these days” (D3 125). She wonders what the “elderly lady” of fifty will make of the musings of the thirty-seven-year-old composing the words in that moment (D1 234).

That she intends the diary for later use is clear, and though she sometimes jokes that she gives it more attention than her “real” writing, it is never in fact a waste of time. The question of intention is complicated by the last sentence Woolf wrote in her life, the last line of her suicide note on 28 March 1941: “Will you destroy all my papers” (L6 487,

488). Was Woolf afraid that Leonard might publish her diaries? Did she have some reason to suppress anything in them, or was she merely wishing to keep her private life

12 private? Did she truly feel that Leonard Woolf, her most steadfast literary supporter, would be capable of destroying her papers? If not, why did she not destroy them herself?

Such questions are again impossible to answer, but suggest a great deal about Woolf’s own approach to the work that occupied twenty-four consecutive years of her life.

Chapter Two addresses the complicated role that the diary plays in Virginia

Woolf’s professional writing life. She is the first to acknowledge that her diary writing has led to “some increase of ease in my professional writing,” and claims that “[i]t loosens the ligaments” (D1 266). There is not a single major work by Virginia Woolf that is not addressed on some level in the diary, and all of her novels and book-length manuscripts after 1917 are given substantial consideration in its pages. Her first two novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), were written during a period when Woolf was not regularly keeping a diary, but, as will be seen, she uses the letters written during this time in much the same way that she would later use the diary—as a sounding board for ideas, a place to try out experimental prose, to pose structural questions, to check her progress, and, often, to castigate herself for not meeting her strict deadlines. The chapter examines the composition of each of her major works (with the exception of her non-fiction essays A Room of One’s Own [1929] and Three Guineas

[1938] and the “biography” Flush [1933]) as detailed in the diary, looking for ways in which the diary serves the fiction and the fiction serves the diary, and how aspects of

Woolf’s life become “the proper stuff of fiction” (CR1 150). Woolf allows the diary to develop into a form of freewriting which serves her creative process, particularly during the composition of the highly experimental The Waves (1931), only to have this evolution in the diary’s method devolve when she begins the more conventional The Years (1937).

13 I suggest that the diary played a fundamental role in Woolf’s professional writing life: it

was a place for her to ruminate, to reflect, to plan, to celebrate, to mourn, and to hone her

skills, thus making it, to my mind, essential reading for all serious readers of her fiction.

In Chapter Three, I suggest that the diary of Virginia Woolf may be read as a

modernist text, perhaps on par with her acknowledged masterpieces Mrs. Dalloway, To

the Lighthouse, and The Waves. On the surface, it does not seem possible that a diary— so bound by its day-to-day form—could be considered modernist, particularly given the stylistic pyrotechnics that one often associates with the term. But this is precisely the issue: Woolf’s modernism, by her own definition in her literary manifestos “Modern

Fiction” (1923) and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1923), is not founded primarily on formal experimentation—though her published fiction clearly is stylistically experimental, it is not as experimental as that of Joyce—but rather on the shift in emphasis from the mechanics of plot and structure to the delineation of character. When

Woolf suggests in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” that writers must never forget the figure of Mrs. Brown, that old woman in the train carriage with her life locked up tight inside her, she sounds the call for a new emphasis in fiction, without once suggesting that one requires a new form for such an enterprise. As it happened, her fiction exhibits both the new emphasis and new form hand in hand, but the predominant requirement for

Virginia Woolf is an emphasis on character—on inner lives, not on “this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner,” which is “false, unreal, merely conventional” (D3 209). And yet how does Woolf’s own account of her own

“appalling business”—her own many descriptions of “getting on from lunch to dinner”— square with modernism? It is the delineation of character, her own character, that

14 distinguishes Woolf’s diary as a modernist text. Elizabeth Podnieks claims that Woolf was a modernist woman, living a modernist life, and thus the book that records that life should also be considered a modernist work: “Women who lived modernism as much as they wrote it necessarily inscribed that modernism within their diaries, for diaries are life texts” (9). Woolf’s diary is a record of an unconventional, modern life: she had an unconventional marriage, an unconventional family, unconventional love affairs, wrote unconventional books. And she records that life in a blend of genres: the diary is part diary, part fiction, part reportage, part history. And in its emphasis on time—how it moves, how it feels as it’s moving, how different people perceive its motion differently— the diary forges another link with Woolf’s modernist fiction, which, in novel after novel, addresses the passage of time.

Woolf famously claimed that a woman needs £500 a year and a room of her own if she is to be a writer. While Woolf did often have a literal room of her own, the diary also serves as a “portable room of one’s own,” a place where the thoughts and feelings essential to a creative life can be put down and examined, even in the midst of turmoil.

Chapter Four looks specifically at Woolf’s personal relationships, for we would be remiss to ignore the very real personal function that the diary serves for her. I address the myth of her sexless marriage to Leonard Woolf, and argue that close reading of the diary reveals a long-standing physical relationship between them, one that posits a rethinking of “normal” marital behavior; her feelings about motherhood and her own childless state, specifically with respect to her sister Vanessa Bell and Vanessa’s children, Julian,

Quentin, and Angelica; and her relationship with Vita Sackville-West and the markedly different versions of the story that can be found in her letters and the diary. Woolf’s

15 diary was in many ways her truest confidante—one gets the sense that she tells it things she could never tell another person—and thus its personal relevance to her, apart from its uses as a modernist text and as a writing tool, should not be overlooked.

As noted earlier, most Woolf scholars (including, once, myself) have looked at the diary as an adjunct to the fiction, and have found it useful biographically and historically. It is my hope that this project will direct attention to the diary itself as a text—a rich, various, multifaceted, elegant, funny book, one that repays close scrutiny and illuminates the entirety of Woolf’s oeuvre.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

Virginia Woolf’s often idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and abbreviation have been retained in all passages quoted from her diaries and other published works.

16

Chapter One: “What sort of diary should I like mine to be?” Questions of Audience and Intention

On Easter Sunday, 20 April 1919, Virginia Woolf, in her “idleness” after having

completed a long essay on Daniel Defoe, took up her diary, and addressed directly her

purposes, aims, methods and intentions.

[…] I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough & random style of it, often so ungrammatical, & 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; & take no time over this; & 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 & vigour, & sometimes hits an unexpected bulls eye. But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practise. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses & the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct & instant shots at my object, & thus have to lay hands on words, choose them, & 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 & scrupulously, in fiction. What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & 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 & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, & yet steady, tranquil composed 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 […]. (D1 266)

It is deservedly one of the most famous passages in Woolf’s diary; nearly everyone writing on the diaries cites it (with Lynn Z. Bloom acknowledging that many call it “the quintessential definition of women’s diaries” [29]); it has provided the titles for books

(Harriet Blodgett’s compilation of excerpts from Englishwomen’s diaries, Capacious

17 Hold-All, as well as this study), has been mouthed by Eileen Atkins in documentaries

about Woolf, and has been seen with some validity as being Woolf’s fullest expression of

her thoughts on journal- or diary-keeping.1 And indeed, the main questions behind this study would appear to have been answered on that Easter Sunday: the “rough & random,”

“haphazard” style indicates a swift writing pace, a work that is not paused or mulled over2; she is clear that the audience is “whichever self it is that reads this hereafter”; the

question of audience is further verified by Woolf forbidding “her”—the future Virginia—

from letting “the eye of man” behold it; the diary is to be valued for the “ease” it is

imparting to her more formal writing; she aspires for the diary to attain a form, one that is

a “composed” whole, with the “aloofness of a work of art”; she demands of herself a lack

of censorship, since the diary is for her eyes only, and that she must feel free to write

however she wishes, and on whatever topic. And yet, despite Woolf’s thoroughness, her

candor, her introspection, her astonishing turns of phrase, the passage, when read in the

context of the diary as a whole, can be viewed as only a partially accurate portrait of

those “casual half hours after tea.”

It is my intention in this chapter to examine the questions surrounding audience

and intention in Woolf’s diary by relying on both the internal evidence of the diaries

themselves and the commentaries and critical apparatuses that have arisen in the wake of

their complete publication. I begin by acknowledging that when attempting to address

1 It should be noted that throughout this study, I use the terms “diary” and “journal” interchangeably. For a discussion of the historic differences between the two terms, see Elizabeth Podnieks, Daily Modernism, p. 13-15. (Podnieks’s discussion is also summarized at the beginning of my own Chapter Three.) As the terms have shifted in current emphasis so that they are nearly synonymous, I am comfortable alternating between them here.

2 The “unpondered” nature of the diaries is verified by Anne Olivier Bell, who notes that “[t]here is remarkably little crossed out or altered in these pages considering the speed at which Virginia wrote; indeed the pace at which she wrote precluded those corrections and additions which are so striking a feature of her more pondered manuscripts” (D1 x).

18 topics as slippery as authorial intention, one is almost bound to arrive at only partial, assumptive conclusions. And yet the questions must be asked, for the answers—however incomplete and unsatisfactory—suggest a framework in which to read the diary for other themes, concepts and ideas. In my research, I have found that many scholars take issue with Woolf’s own presentation of the diary in the passage above. Some readers of

Woolf’s diary have argued that far from being a private work meant for her eyes alone, the diary was regularly read by Leonard Woolf, and was thus written with him in mind; similarly, many argue that the early journals (collected in A Passionate Apprentice

[1990]) were routinely read by Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, and that internal evidence and her habitual use of “Miss Jan” as a stand-in for herself, suggest a kind of code to prevent her father and other family members gaining access to her private thoughts. And while Woolf argues for an uncensored account of her life in the diary, there are, as Hermione Lee notes (4), numerous things that she never mentions directly in the diary, or prefers to describe in coded ways (particularly sexual activities and menstruation, or her feelings of attraction for women, as in the case of Vita Sackville-

West), which flies in the face of the legendary Bloomsbury penchant for frank talk on all subjects.3 Most scholars do not view these facts as rendering the above passage invalid, for the diary clearly serves many of the functions she proposes. In its purest form, the diary is for Virginia Woolf an exercise in freewriting, decades before Peter Elbow proclaimed its benefits. The “looseness” she acquired through writing it fostered an increase in productivity; it is no accident that Woolf’s most prolific professional decade—the 1920s—is also her most prolific diary decade—the two forms of writing are,

3 Epitomized most memorably, perhaps, by Lytton Strachey’s infamous query on noticing a stain on Vanessa Bell’s dress: “Semen?” (MOB 173).

19 for her, inextricably linked.

The questions persist. To whom did Woolf write in her diary? Her future self?

Leonard Woolf? A vague and unspecified audience who might ultimately read the work

in some published form? How did Woolf see herself in the community of diarists? Did

she model her work on published diarists, like Pepys, that she read in childhood? Did she

see the work as a continuous whole? Was it yet another crafted text? Or was it truly the

random, haphazard document she claimed? Before addressing these questions, it is first

necessary to examine the historical and theoretical perspectives with which questions of

audience and intention are discussed, as well as to situate Woolf’s diary in a historical

context.

“The shadow reader rifling the diary’s pages”

Both Elizabeth Podnieks and Judy Simons, in their studies of literary women’s

diaries, cite a scene from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), in which Cecily and Algernon discuss young girls and their diaries. As Podnieks notes, it is so revealing about prevailing perceptions and attitudes about women and their diaries that it merits substantial quotation:

Algernon: I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection. Cecily: I think your frankness does you great credit, Ernest. If you will allow me, I will copy your remarks into my diary. (Goes over to table and begins writing in diary.) Algernon: Do you really keep a diary? I’d give anything to look at it. May I? Cecily: Oh, no. (Puts her hand over it.) You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy. But pray, Ernest, don’t stop. I delight in taking down from dictation. I have reached “absolute perfection”. You can go on. I am quite ready for more. Algernon (somewhat taken aback): Ahem! Ahem!

20 Cecily: Oh, don’t cough, Ernest. When one is dictating one should speak fluently and not cough. Besides, I don’t know how to spell a cough. (Writes as Algernon speaks.) (357; qtd. partially in Podnieks 28)

By the time of The Importance of Being Earnest’s production, the practice of writing diaries had become widespread enough among young Englishwomen and the publication of such diaries had become so commonplace that Wilde was able, in his typical fashion, to make merciless fun of the contradictions inherent in the activity. Cecily coyly covers her pages while at the same time announcing that the diary will surely be published one day, at which time Algernon will be granted a look. Cecily’s reliance on dictation, on taking down every word Algernon says (including his “Ahem!”), suggests the frivolity and uselessness of the diary. And yet there is still something mysterious and secretive about women and their diaries: Algernon would “give anything” to have a look at it, for it might reveal Cecily’s secrets, or what she really thinks about him. There is an admonishing tone to Algernon’s query, a possible threat to masculine superiority, bringing to mind Jane Carlyle’s observation: “I remember Charles Buller saying of the

Duchess of Praslin’s murder, ‘What could a poor fellow do with a wife who kept a journal but murder her’” (qtd. in Podnieks 49).

The diary has long had a female literary lineage (with some of the earliest extant diaries being the “pillow books” of court women like Sei Shonagon during Japan’s Heian dynasty, from 794-1185 [Podnieks 13]), and yet of the published works, the privileged diaries tended to be those penned by men, at least until the twentieth century. The reasons for this are too complex to be examined here,4 but it is worth noting that keeping

a diary was, by the seventeenth century (one of the earliest extant Englishwomen’s

4 For a thorough and lucid examination of the privileging of men’s diaries over women’s, see Podnieks, Daily Modernism, particularly Chapters Two and Three.

21 diaries is that of Lady Margaret Hoby [1571-1633] [Podnieks 46]), an acceptable and legitimate pursuit for a woman, though one that was a decorous sort of accomplishment and one that served a certain moral function, as girls who kept diaries were often expected to fill them with pious thoughts on improving their conduct. These so-called

“etiquette books” “armed women in their diaristic fight against their moral weaknesses and urged them to celebrate their moral victories and domestic conquests” (Podnieks 51).

It is significant that the published diaries of writers like Pepys were not required to fulfill any moralistic function.

There is a great deal of critical discussion around the notions of “true” and “false” diaries. With the gradual publication of the unexpurgated diaries of Anaïs Nin and the revelation that many of her entries were written and rewritten over many years, to the extent that many portions of the diary are outright fiction (leading some to call the work

Nin’s “liary” [Podnieks 11]), the critical debate over whether or not there is such a thing as a “true” diary has increased. As outlined by Elizabeth Podnieks, the argument

is polarized by scholars such as Arthur Ponsonby [author of English Diaries and More English Diaries], who stresses that it has nothing to do with art, and those such as Lawrence Rosenwald [Emerson and the Art of the Diary], who contends that it has everything to do with art. The diary is either a spontaneously uncrafted document or a carefully crafted text. The crisis that obtains is this: a definition of the diary as literature necessarily hinges on its conception as an aesthetic work; but if the diary in question is artistically motivated, it cannot be a diary per se. (4)

That the latter assumption should be so is the result of the notion that “[o]f all the literary genres, the diary is the only one that, to be imaged ‘authentically,’ must be written with no consideration of an audience beyond the writer herself. Further, by virtue of being defined as a daybook—to be recorded in regularly—it must be spontaneous and therefore unconstructed” (Podnieks 18). In recent years, the general critical consensus has shifted

22 to the assumption that there is no such thing as a text, or a narrative, without an audience of some kind. Narratives, even the often-fractured narratives of diaries, imply a reader or listener, and thus “the question of narrative cannot be separated from the question of audience” (Martinson 6). The relatively old-fashioned notion of a “true” diary—the uncrafted, spontaneous document espoused by Arthur Ponsonby—has given way, thanks to critical movements including feminist theory, deconstruction, and studies of the development of individualism,5 to a more complex view of the process of diary-writing.

The activity is, in general, no longer seen as the simple writing of words into a void; there is an implied audience suggested by the very phrase with which young people (and some adults) address their journals: “Dear Diary.”

Harriet Blodgett notes the development of a literary self-consciousness in

Englishwomen’s diaries, and marks this as a shift from the kinds of diaries prevalent in

Pepys’s era:

Englishwomen, like Englishmen, have written diaries recognizable as such since at least the sixteenth century, when they gradually moved away from recording public events to private ones and from detached commentary to more personal mirroring of themselves. When record keepers began fleshing out impersonal records with self, the diary was born. Robert Fothergill finds in the tradition of English diary keeping thereafter a gradual “evolution towards literary self-consciousness,” which had become widespread by the beginning of the nineteenth century, for diarists in time also grew more alert to style and manner, sensible of themselves as writers, even if only in private. Women, one discovers, early became uneasy about their writing and continued to be so. (21-22)

Deborah Martinson situates this unease, particularly for literary women, in the knowledge or suspicion that their husbands or lovers or fathers might read the diary, and argues that the construction of self in the diary’s pages is “tweaked” as “she imagines the shadow reader rifling the diary’s pages” (5). She claims that it is foolhardy to ignore the pressure

5 See Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography, for a detailed examination of the development of memoir and autobiography from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance [Podnieks 15].

23 that a man with “diary privileges” exerts on the creation of the diary text; his presence is always hovering in the background, and thus “[a] woman writer, who for a myriad of reasons may seek approval from the men in her own domestic and literary sphere, writes in peril when she writes a diary” (8). According to Lynn Z. Bloom, “When such readers lurk at the writer’s elbow, welcome or not, there is no way to rule out self-censorship”

(24). As will be seen, this observation is particularly pertinent in the case of Virginia

Woolf, as Leonard Woolf was always concerned for her welfare and well-being, and may have been inclined to examine her diaries for signs of mental strain. In addition, literary women, those famous or who supposed they might become famous for their published works, may have suspected that their presumably private words might one day see publication due to their literary fame (Martinson 2); many of these women, including

Woolf, were extremely well read in the diaristic tradition, and thus, as Rosenwald suggests, may have begun thinking of their diaries as books, with futures, and therefore began to craft them accordingly (22). Such self-consciousness is at the core of the modern diary tradition. Bloom suggests that “for a professional writer there are no private writings” (24), and that the knowledge of a future audience creates a focus for the work, elevates it to art:

The private performance may be less polished than the manuscript destined for publication from the outset, but once a writer, like an actor, is audience-oriented, such considerations as telling a good story, getting the sounds and the rhythm right, supplying sufficient detail for another’s understanding, can never be excluded. All writers know this; they attend to such matters through design and habit. (24-25).

The word “performance” is significant, for, as many have noted, there is often an exhibitionistic streak being acted out in the writing of a diary; Judy Simons begins her study Diaries and Journals of Literary Women from Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf

24 with a chapter entitled “Secret Exhibitionists: Women and their Diaries.” Podnieks also acknowledges Sarah Gristwood, who,

in Recording Angels, wonders whether diary writing is “really the most private form of writing known to man—or woman—or a sneaky surfacing of the exhibitionist streak which lies at the heart of us all?” She considers the truth to be the latter, for she cites many examples which prove that “the possibility of the entries being read by someone else is always at the back of the diarist’s mind.” (27-28)

Thus the current state of the modern diary: torn between the truly private and the truly public, the text written for oneself or written for a public audience. It is a tension apparent throughout all of the volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, from her first extant entry in 1897, to her last, four days before her suicide in 1941. Alexandra Johnson recalls the tiny diaries with metal locks and keys marketed to young girls in her childhood (3). It was in such a book that Virginia Stephen, aged fifteen, began her diary in 1897 (Podnieks 102). This would be her last diary to be kept under lock and key; her later books would be bound, unlocked volumes. But to some degree, she kept at the practice in the same manner throughout her life. One important note at the outset: it is tempting, given the publication history of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, to read the journals published in A Passionate Apprentice differently from those published in Anne Olivier

Bell’s series. Unlike Woolf’s letters, which were published chronologically over a period of years, the diaries were published out of sequence, with the early journals appearing six years after the completion of what is often referred to in Woolf scholarship as “the main series.” But this term is problematic, for what constitutes the “main” diary? While we see the early journals as apprentice work (thanks in large part to the title that Mitchell A.

Leaska chose for his edition), there is no evidence to suggest that Virginia Woolf thought of her early diaries as being at all different from what has come to be known as “the main

25 series.” Granted, the gap in the diaries—from 1909 to 1915—is significant, and while their content does seem different (which will be examined below), there is again no reason to suppose that Woolf thought of these early books as anything but the early stages of one very long, continuous work. This is worth noting primarily because the work in A Passionate Apprentice is sometimes viewed as secondary to Anne Olivier

Bell’s edition of the 1915-1941 diary, due in part to the fact that it appeared second, and deals with a period of Woolf’s life in which she was developing as a fledgling writer.

And yet it is my contention that the work should be considered a whole, and that the divisions imposed by the work’s publication history should be ignored as much as possible.

“Whom do I tell when I tell a blank page?”

In a piece entitled “Rambling Round Evelyn” (a review of the diary of John

Evelyn), Virginia Woolf claims:

There can be no doubt that the good diarists are those who write either for themselves or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is no need either of affectation or of restraint. But a diary written to be published in the author’s lifetime is no better than a private version of the newspaper, and often worse. The good opinion of our contemporaries means so much to us that it is well worth while to tell them lies. (qtd. in Blodgett 14)

It is tempting to apply Woolf’s remarks wholesale to her own diary, and therefore to assume that her own personal writing was not a “private version of the newspaper,” and that it was purely for herself or for that distant posterity. While the questions of audience and intention are certainly pertinent in the early journals published as A Passionate

Apprentice, it is in the series that begins in 1915 that they take on added weight and complexity.

26 Briefly, the questions of audience and intention as applied to the early Passionate

Apprentice diaries tend to revolve around the issue of who in the Stephen household at 22

Hyde Park Gate may have had access to the journals. The diaries from 1897 to 1904 (the

time during which Virginia Stephen was living in the family house in Kensington) can be

read as permeated by the fear that they will be read by others in the family, particularly

by Virginia’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen. Many critics, including—most prominently—

Louise DeSalvo, argue that Virginia’s frequent habit in these early years of creating the

persona “Miss Jan”—an alter ego who performs embarrassing, funny, ludicrous, or even

censorious acts—sought to enable her to write about herself in a safe way, a way that

allowed her both to say and not say what was really on her mind. When “Miss Jan” said

or thought or did something, “Virginia” was off the hook.6 In addition, the 1897 diary

features “ciphers,” circular marks in the text that have left many scholars (including A

Passionate Apprentice’s editor, Mitchell Leaska) baffled; Vanessa Curtis proposes that

these are a kind of code for Virginia to keep track of her menstrual cycle, either on the

advice of her doctors or of her half-sister Stella Duckworth, who was caring for Virginia

after their mother’s death in 1895.7 Both the ciphers and “Miss Jan” can be read as a

kind of code, a way in which Virginia could both write the diary and keep certain matters

private; such code would allow her to record these matters for posterity, and thus not risk

losing them to time. It is however unclear whether or not members of the Stephen

household had access to Virginia’s diary; it is for instance not known where it was kept—

6 See DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, Chapter 8, “As Miss Jan Says,” for her reading of the early diaries and the “Miss Jan” persona. This reading has been frequently criticized by Woolf scholars, including Hermione Lee in her biography of Woolf (see her notes to Chapter Eight).

7 See Curtis, “The Ciphers in A Passionate Apprentice,” for details on her comparison of Woolf’s diary with that of Stella Duckworth for the corroboration of Woolf’s menstrual cycle during this time period.

27 a problem to be addressed for the later diaries as well. Mitchell Leaska claims that the diary was “very private” (x); Deborah Martinson suggests that “Leslie Stephen actively perused his children’s writings, took great pride in them, and then imposed his own authoritative responses on them” (22), but she offers no substantial evidence for this assumption. Nowhere in either the vast biographical body of work on Woolf or in her own writings is there any evidence that Leslie Stephen read his daughter’s diary with any regularity, if ever. Accounts of the daily life at 22 Hyde Park Gate suggest that apart from mealtimes and family gatherings, Leslie Stephen largely kept to himself in his study at the top of the house; it is difficult to imagine him going through his daughter’s room in order to read her private musings. There is certainly evidence that Woolf showed early work to her father for his approval, but it is not clear that this material included her diary.

It is far more likely that she showed him critical essays, not the daily accounts of trips and outings, and not the antics of “Miss Jan.” So while the supposition that Leslie may have read young Virginia’s early diaries certainly lends credence to the reading of “Miss

Jan” and the ciphers (as would the fact that, as Nigel Nicolson said of Woolf’s letters from this period, she would write “squiggy,” as part of a “family joke” of bad, almost unreadable penmanship [Broun]), there is again little evidence to support this, and it must be considered guesswork.

It is only in the diaries which begin in 1915 that Virginia Woolf herself begins to address the question of audience. On occasion, she puts the question bluntly: “Whom do

I tell when I tell a blank page?” (D3 239); more often, she muses about both the future readers of the work and the future uses to which she will put it. Her primary audience, she believes, will be herself, “Old Virginia”:

28 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 & 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 subterfuge will then be possible: 50 is elderly, though I anticipate her protest & 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 & their present condition, with some account of my friends characters; & to add an estimate of their work, & a forecast of their future works. The lady of 50 will be able to say how near to the truth I come […] (D1 234)

The diary thus takes on, for Woolf in this instance, an oracular quality, with Woolf in the role of fortune-teller. Such descriptions of recording for the “old Virginia” so that she might verify her guesses are rare; more often she appears to view her diary as a “great mass for my memoirs” (D5 332).

There is a good deal of internal evidence to suggest that the diaries were written for her eyes alone. Thomas Mallon, in a personal note in his A Book of One’s Own:

People and Their Diaries (1984), claims:

I don’t believe one can write for oneself for many words more than get used in a note tacked to the refrigerator, saying “Buy Bread.” Before another sentence is added it becomes a psychological impossibility; the words have to start going someplace. Your “you” may even be less palpable than mine, but someday, like the one you love, he’ll come along. “He” may turn out to be a great-great- granddaughter, one summer afternoon a hundred years from now, going through boxes in an attic—or the man to whom she’s sold the house, without remembering to clean out the garage. But an audience will turn up. In fact, you’re counting on it. Someone will be reading and you’ll be talking. And if you’re talking, it means you’re alive. (xvi-xvii)

He notes also that he occasionally alters spelling, makes corrections, explains things that do not need to be explained to himself, all with the idea of this reader in mind (xvi). But for the most part, Virginia Woolf does not do this. With the occasional exception (such as referring to “my father Sir Leslie” [D1 181]), Woolf does not explain much in her

29 diary. Indeed, she has a tendency to be cryptic and arcane, and her rendering of people’s names is nearly always as initials: “L” for Leonard, “N” for Vanessa Bell (“Nessa”) or

Nelly Boxall, the Woolfs’ cook (with the identity of “N” entirely dependent on the context), “D” for Duncan Grant or Desmond MacCarthy (again, dependent on context),

“C” for Clive Bell, “V” for Vita Sackville-West, and so on. In Editing Virginia Woolf’s

Diary, Anne Olivier Bell provides a detailed, witty, and often extremely funny account of her ten years of work on the annotations to the diary. It is an account full of trips to dusty libraries, hours spent poring over letters turned out of Leonard Woolf’s pockets, countless interviews with surviving friends, experts on the period, etc. In one account she details her puzzlement over the phrase “Burke Sir Walter,” and why Woolf might have written this when crossing the Scottish border in 1938 (18); in another she tells of the months of research required to determine the location of a manor house in Hounslow and of the drunk woman who resided there. The result of said research: “On page 46 of Volume II of The Diary of Virginia Woolf these researches are encapsulated in a six-line footnote”

(18-20). It seems clear from these few examples that Woolf was not writing with other readers’ eyes in mind nor for publication; or if she was, then she was writing without the slightest regard for the time and trouble of a future editor. This tendency on the part of

Woolf to use abbreviations and not to clarify obscurities contradicts Mallon’s assertion that diary writers must write for a larger audience as part of the nature of the activity. If

Woolf was writing for a reader, then the reader would have had to have been an extremely informed one.

Which leads to the question of Leonard Woolf. Shortly before her death, in the fall of 1940, Virginia Woolf wrote a short story entitled “The Legacy,” in which a

30 husband learns, from his deceased wife’s diary, that she was having an affair. In life, the wife keeps the diary a secret: “Ever since they were married, she had kept a diary […].

When he came in and found her writing, she always shut it or put her hand over it. ‘No, no, no,’ he could hear her say. ‘After I’m dead—perhaps.’ So she had left it for him, as her legacy” (qtd. in Podnieks 112). It is reductive to read the story as autobiographical, but the wife’s actions—the covering of the text with her hands, her reluctant acknowledgment that he can read the diary when she is dead—could be revealing of

Woolf’s state of mind about her own work, particularly given the fact of her own imminent death. Several scholars believe that Leonard had “diary privileges” (to use

Deborah Martinson’s term [8]), thanks largely to a comment made by Virginia on 8

October 1917. In this oft-quoted passage, the first in the return to the more formal diary following the cessation of her 1915 volume and the Asheham diary of the summer of

1917 (in which she recorded mostly natural phenomena, such as weather), Virginia notes the discovery of her 1915 diary “in a wooden box,” which has the power to make “us” laugh at Walter Lamb (the object of some ridicule in that earlier volume). She says that she will start the diary again, and that “L[eonard] has promised to add his page when he has something to say. His modesty is to be overcome” (D1 55). It is difficult to know how to read this passage. There is a joking, mocking tone to it, in keeping with “their” laughter over Walter Lamb, and the fact that Leonard will write only “when he has something to say” would seem to imply, again jokingly, that very often he does not have something to say—at least not something worth recording in the diary; hence his

“modesty” which needs to be “overcome”—and thus, it is not likely that he will write very often. (It is worth noting that Leonard did in fact keep a series of pocket diaries,

31 largely in Sinhalese shorthand—a result of his years as a colonial administrator in

Ceylon—detailing monetary transactions [down to the penny], and, by some accounts,

Virginia’s menstrual cycle, in a repeat of Stella Duckworth’s earlier record. These

pocket diaries have yet to be published.)

But there are in fact two instances in which Leonard makes entries in Virginia’s

diary. The first is on 11 November 1917, and appears in the middle of one of Virginia’s

sentences, as she mentions a luncheon at the Webbs’: “I rashly said that I would

occasionally write a page here & now V. calls on me to redeem my word, & as it will

take me from reading Joseph Chamberlain’s speeches, I dont see why I shouldn’t” (D1

74). Virginia’s entry picks up again, in mid-sentence, at the end of Leonard’s, which, in

published form, is some twenty-two lines long. Leonard’s second and final entry appears

on 1 May 1918, and, while not interrupting one of Virginia’s sentences, again details a

meal with the Webbs. This time there is no introduction or apology: “Went to dine at

Webbs. Camille Huysmans & Sir William Tyrrell there. The latter is now Head of

Commercial Intelligence Dept & is engaged on drawing up complete dossier of our terms

for the Peace Conference” (D1 145). Virginia’s entry again is taken up when his is completed, this time at twenty-three lines.

Much has been made, by Deborah Martinson and Barbara Lounsberry in particular, about these entries (though Lounsberry only mentions the first in her essay

“Virginia Woolf and the Community of Diarists” [203]), and they certainly point to a degree of openness between Virginia and Leonard with respect to these supposedly private writings. And yet Leonard’s entries must be examined in context; failure to do so results in a misreading that grants Leonard far more authoritative a role in the diary’s

32 composition. It is important to note that Leonard’s two entries (out of the hundreds that comprise Woolf’s complete diary) both describe meals at the home of Sidney and

Beatrice Webb, the proponents of Fabian Socialism and the “virtual” founders of the

London School of Economics, with whom Leonard was frequently meeting during this period through his work with both the Fabians and the Women’s Co-operative Guild (D1,

18 n 51, 24 n 68, 8 n 19). If one examines Virginia’s own comments about the Webbs in the diary, it becomes clear that her feelings about them were ambivalent at best: Beatrice

Webb is once described as “an industrious spider at the table; spinning her webs (a pun!—) incessantly” (D1 26).8 This period was one in which Virginia was ambivalent also about politics (her own political flowering would not occur until the 1930s, with the rise of fascism and particularly after the death of her nephew Julian Bell in the Spanish

Civil War in 1937); she also often complained about the amount of Leonard’s time the

Webbs claimed. In addition, she also lamented the difficulty in writing down the things people say, social conversations: “I told Lytton I should try to write down his talk— which sprang from a conversation about Boswell” (D2 201). Boswell was always capable of taking down, one assumes, all of the great doctor’s sayings, but Woolf finds such recording difficult, almost impossible. Therefore, it seems far more likely that

Virginia, in asking Leonard to write an account of the Webbs for her, was deferring both to his superior knowledge of them and his ability to convey their political talk fluidly on the page—most of his second entry consists of the political jargon that went around the table that day. Note again that her husband’s entries are entirely at her invitation: “V. calls on me to redeem my word.” There is no indication that Leonard routinely went

8 See entries for 11 November 1917, 1 May 1918, and especially 18 September 1918 (which describes a visit by the Webbs to Asheham), among others, for Virginia’s thoughts on the Webbs and their work.

33 through his wife’s diary at all. Indeed, in an entry dated 3 February 1927, Virginia relates a conversation in which “L. taking up a volume the other day said Lord save him if I died first & he had to read through these” (D3 125). The line is interesting, given that

Leonard “takes up” a volume (was this at Woolf’s invitation?), and his statement, if even true, contains some of the playful mocking that characterized so much of his relationship with Virginia, but it might also indicate that the bulk of the diary has not been read by him; perhaps what he has seen has in fact been at Virginia’s invitation, not unlike the situation with the entries he made on the Webbs.

There is considerable vagueness as to where Woolf actually kept the diaries. If

Leonard was able to “take one up,” as in the passage above, where might they have been stored? Was the current volume out on her writing table, or in her work space? This would seem unlikely, given the fact that she often stated that she was unable to write the diary with anyone else in the room: at the end of a superficial and particularly dull entry on 1 January 1941, she states, “A psychologist would see that the above was written with someone, & a dog, in the room” (D5 351), indicating that the presence of others causes her to remain on the surface, not to delve deep. And yet Hermione Lee, in her examination of both the diary and the “reading notebooks” manuscripts, indicates that many of them have animal pawprints on them, suggesting that they were left about open on the floor, so that the dog could step on the pages (406). Such haphazardness does not suggest books that were meant to be hidden away. However, the 1915 volume, with its descriptions of Walter Lamb which make “us” laugh, was found “in a wooden box in my cupboard” (D1 55)—a box in my cupboard, rather than a communal cupboard; at the same time, the box is not described as being locked. At the end of 1917, when discussing

34 the fact that the “diary habit has come to life at Charleston” and that Duncan Grant and

Bunny Garnett are each keeping journals, Woolf notes that “[t]he sad thing is that we daren’t trust each other to read our books; they lie, like vast consciences, in our most secret drawers” (D1 95). This last reference might be metaphorical, but the entry suggests that Woolf had hoped for some kind of shared experience (a hope that would come to fruition in Bloomsbury in 1920 as The Memoir Club, started by Molly

MacCarthy [Hussey 158]), and she is disappointed at not being given access to her friends’ “private” thoughts. This does not guarantee that she would have been so willing to share her own: the diaries, after all, lie “like vast consciences,” and witness her later despair over “baring her soul” at a Memoir Club reading in March 1920 (D2 25-26). A recent query to the Virginia Woolf listserv (an online community of Woolf scholars through the Ohio State University) about where Woolf might have kept the diaries met with numerous admissions of “I have no idea, but good question!” The revelation of whether Woolf hid the diaries or kept them relatively available would go a long way to determining many of her thoughts on privacy and audience, but it seems unlikely that such a revelation will be forthcoming. When her last London home in Mecklenburgh

Square was damaged by bombs in October 1940, Woolf traveled up to London from

Sussex and collected her diaries: “24 vols of diary salved; a great mass for my memoirs”

(D5 332), but again, there is no indication of where, in the rubble, she found the volumes.

Harriet Blodgett raises an important issue in her discussion of Woolf and self- censorship, an issue that may shed additional light on the question of audience. If Woolf, as she herself suggests in the passage which opens this chapter, strives for her diary to be free of self-censorship, then it would follow that no corner of her life should be left

35 unswept in the diary’s pages, that she will write about all of the “violent moods of my

soul” (D2 304). But, as Blodgett points out, Woolf often deliberately avoids discussing

her “soul,” and thus would appear to be keeping a vital truth off the page (50-51). This

debate, of to write or not to write about “the soul,” preoccupies Woolf in the early to mid-

1920s. On 19 February 1923, she writes, “How it would interest me if this diary were to

become a real diary: something in which I could see changes, trace moods developing;

but then I should have to speak of the soul, & did I not banish the soul when I began?

What happens is, as usual, that I’m going to write about the soul, & life breaks in” (D2

234). Hermione Lee ponders the difference between “life” and “the soul” (5), but I suggest that it could be read as Woolf’s lament that the moment she begins to set down her innermost self, the day-to-day minutiae of living come in, overwhelming the entry.

The timing of this passage is significant in view of Woolf’s professional career: in 1922 she had published her first modernist novel, Jacob’s Room, and in February 1923 she was poised to begin work on The Hours, soon to be retitled Mrs. Dalloway. In her modernist fiction at its best, she achieves a balance between the profound and the quotidian, perhaps best exemplified by Clarissa Dalloway’s superficial walk through London in preparation for her party, while beneath the surface the whole of her life is unfurled for the reader.

Her discussion of “the soul” versus “life” in the diary thus directly relates to her predicament as a professional writer: how can “life” and “the soul” coexist on the page?

How to keep “life” from swamping “the soul”?

Significantly, in June 1924, by which time she was well underway with Mrs.

Dalloway, Woolf writes, “I think its time to cancel that vow against soul description.

What was I going to say? Something about the violent moods of my soul. How describe

36 them, even with a waking mind? I think I grow more & more poetic” (D2 304). Her

breaking of her vow leaves her instantly confused (“What was I going to say?”), and her

mind needs to be “awake” even to contemplate “the soul.” her notion of becoming “more

& more poetic” also corresponds with her modernist project in fiction, for her work

becomes increasingly more poetic the more modernist it becomes, culminating perhaps in

the prose-poetry of The Waves. And yet, in February 1926, she is still unsure about how

to write about her “soul”: “As for the soul: why did I say I would leave it out? I forget.

And the truth is, one can't write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes” (D3 62).

And still in 1929: “And two ideas come to me—to break my rule & write about the soul

for once; & to write some exact dialogue” (D3 241)—again, the balance between the quotidian and the profound is never easy.

Can the tension between writing about “life” versus “the soul” be read as Woolf’s self-protection in the face of potential readers? Perhaps. But it is more likely that she was nervous about plumbing her own depths, given that those depths had yielded horrific bouts of madness. It is thus conceivable that a dependence on “life”—the day-to-day,

“sausage & haddock” details of living (D5 358)—may have been the anchor Virginia

Woolf needed to hold onto her tenuous sanity, and may have had nothing to do with the

question of audience at all.

“Diamonds of the dustheap”

From the outset, it is clear that Virginia Woolf intended for her diary to have

personal significance. As noted above, the first volume was written in a standard page-a-

day diary, with lock and key. Her second, from 1899, was far more original and unique.

Elizabeth Podnieks states that reading the 1899 diary in its published form in A

37 Passionate Apprentice does not do justice to the full material and tactile nature of the

volume: Woolf pasted the sheets of this journal onto the pages of Logick: or, The Right

Use of Reason, by Isaac Watts, D.D. (102). In an entry dated 18 September 1899, Woolf

explains her reasons for this:

The work heretofore was contained in one modest paper book, that fronted the world in a state of nature—naked but not ashamed. Boards it reeked not of, now it boasts boards that amount to the dignity of a binding, being ancient tooled calf—the tooling resplendent today as a hundred years ago. A sudden idea struck me, that it would be original useful & full of memories if I embedded the foregoing pages in the leaves of some worthy & ancient work, the like of which might I knew be bought at St. Ives old Curiosity Shop for the sum of 3d. So one day a week or two ago, A. & I drove over there; & demanded old books; the womans husband scours the country for old books & old furniture of all kinds; & the result of his book finds—the modest libraries of country parsonages, sold by the widow to swell her slender purse—& chance outcasts of country gentlemans bookshelves are all bound rudely together like so many bales of wool […]. My work—the present volume, attracted my attention firstly because of its size, which fitted my paper—and 2ndly because its back had a certain air of distinction among its brethren. I fear the additional information given on the title page that this is the Logic of the “Late Reverend & Learned Isaac Watts D.D.” was not a third reason why I bought it. Any other book almost, would have been too sacred to undergo the desecration that I planned; but no one methought could bewail the loss of these pages. LOGICK: OR, THE Right Use of REASON WITH A Variety of Rules to Guard Against ERROR in the AFFAIRS of RELIGION and HUMAN LIFE as well as in the Sciences By Isaac Watts D.D. LONDON MDCCLXXXVI (PA 159-160)

Podnieks suggests that Woolf wished “to prove to herself (and to her future readers) that her recorded thoughts were those of a logical, reasonable, and hence sane person”

(103)—thus the pasting of the pages in a book called Logick. Also, the pasting of the pages into a bound book with an impressive spine suggests that Woolf saw the work as

38 having merit, as being worthy of being stood on a shelf alongside officially published volumes. Such an act says a great deal about the seventeen year-old girl keeping the diary, and of the esteem with which she holds herself and her work—she is beginning to take herself seriously.

Woolf often discusses in the diary her reasons for keeping it, and her reasons are multiple and varied. The diary helps to calm her nerves and “write out my fidgets” (D2

120); it serves to alleviate the boredom of her more formal writing or professional reading (“These ten minutes are stolen from Moll Flanders, which I failed to finish yesterday in accordance with my time sheet” [D1 263]); it is part of a family tradition

(“We have all started to keep a record of the new year—Nessa, Adrian and I” [PA 5]); it is also part of a literary tradition and heritage (she reads a vast number of published and unpublished diaries throughout her life, which will be discussed in a later chapter);9 and finally, it is a way to create herself on the page, to see both the world and herself as works of art:

[T]he whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. (MOB 72)

It is clear that the diary’s primary function is as a practice-ground for writing: in the passage which opens this chapter, Woolf credits the “looseness” in her professional writing to her “casual half hours after tea.” She notes on 20 January 1919 that while

“diary writing does not count as writing,” she has

just reread my years diary & 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 & took thought, it would never be written at all; & the advantage of the

9 See Barbara Lounsberry’s very useful article “Virginia Woolf and the Community of Diarists.”

39 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. (D1 233-34)

Though she speaks often of wanting to use the diaries to write her memoirs, it would appear that the autobiographical pieces written over the last two years of her life and collected in Moments of Being (1976, 1985) were not written with the aid of the diaries, since most of the material covered in the memoirs predates the period covered by the diaries. Her ambivalence toward writing the memoirs at all is seen on 17 August 1938:

“[I] have half a mind one of these days to explain what my intention is in writing these continual diaries. Not publication. Revision? a memoir of my own life? Perhaps. Only other things crop up” (D5 162). Her lack of enthusiasm may be attributed to the fact that she was then immersed in writing Roger Fry’s biography, a task that she found to be a great burden; thus, her feelings on biography of any sort may have been soured by the work on Fry. On 19 February 1940, she writes, “I may as well make a note I say to myself; thinking sometimes who’s going to read all this scribble? I think one day I may brew a tiny ingot out of it—in my memoirs” (D5 269). In citing this passage, Elizabeth

Podnieks suggests that Woolf protests too much, and is justifying to herself the time that the diary is taking away from her professional work, hence the need to see some useful, possibly publishable end to the material (113).

One of the most revealing entries in the whole diary appears on 20 March 1926, in which Woolf again addresses what is to be done with this body of material:

But what is to become of all these diaries, I asked myself yesterday. If I died, what would Leo make of them? He would be disinclined to burn them; he could not publish them. Well, he should make up a book from them, I think; & then burn the body. I daresay there is a little book in them: if the scraps & scratches were straightened out a little. God knows. (D3 67)

The passage, when read in the retrospect of Woolf’s suicide, is rather chilling. She

40 speaks casually of her own death, and predicts, to some extent, the fate of her literary

remains.10 Leonard was indeed incapable of burning her diaries; he did make a book of

them, A Writer’s Diary, in 1953. What is perhaps more unnerving is the use of the word

“body.” It seems clear from the context that the “body” Woolf refers to is the body of the

manuscript that remains after Leonard makes his selection for publication. But coming

on the heels of her comment “If I died,” the phrase “burn the body” sounds like an

offhand reference to the disposal of Woolf’s physical body, after the posthumous papers

are ready for the public. Woolf’s body was in fact cremated, thus making the passage

more disturbing. The notion of embodiment—the linkage between a writer’s body of

work and his or her physical body—is particularly pertinent to a discussion of Virginia

Woolf, a writer for whom issues surrounding the body were a striking feature of her life

and work.

“Will you destroy all my papers.”

One can assume that the last sentence Virginia Woolf wrote in her life was the

final line of her suicide note on 28 March 1941: “Will you destroy all my papers” (L6

487).11 This sentence, written vertically up the page, almost as an afterthought, and

preceded by a reference to “Roger’s letters to the Maurons in the writing table drawer in

the Lodge” (L6 488, 487) (letters which she had been using as research for her biography

of Roger Fry, the last of her books she would see through to press), suggests a number of

10 See Regina Marler, Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), for a thorough discussion of the posthumous publication of Woolf’s work, especially pages 21-42.

11 According to Nigel Nicolson’s edition of the letters, this is the ending of the final suicide note, left for Leonard Woolf on the day of her death; an earlier note, popularized by Michael Cunningham in his novel The Hours (1998) and heard in voice-over in the film version (2002) and ending “I dont think two people could have been happier than we have been” [L6 481] (a line that echoes Terence Hewet’s words upon Rachel Vinrace’s death in The Voyage Out [353]), was left on approximately 18 March 1941, suggesting that Woolf may have contemplated suicide a full ten days before she finally succeeded. See Nicolson’s Appendix A, Letters 6, 489-91.

41 difficult and probably unanswerable questions. Which papers did she mean? The remaining manuscripts in her possession? (She was routinely in the habit of destroying her typescripts, to the chagrin of future scholars.) Letters from friends and family? The fragments of autobiography like “A Sketch of the Past” and “Am I a Snob?” and “Old

Bloomsbury” and “22 Hyde Park Gate,” later to be published in Moments of Being? The diary?

It seems clear that the volumes of diary would have been with her at Monks

House, Sussex, at the time of her death, given her comment in the passage quoted above that she had saved “24 vols” of diary from the bombed house in Mecklenburgh Square.

Given Nicolson’s claim that Woolf’s first suicide note was composed on 18 March 1941, it would appear that she had had time to think about the disposal of her personal papers.

This begs the question: Why did she not destroy the diaries herself? Harriet Blodgett states, “Certainly any diarist who does not personally destroy her diary knows that someday she may chance to be read; some diarists even hope for that reading” (14).

Perhaps she understood the literary value of the material, and was reluctant to make such a rash decision herself, and chose to leave the matter in her husband’s hands. As noted above, Woolf clearly understood that Leonard would be incapable of destroying her diary

(he “would be disinclined to burn them”), and in the same entry she suggests, without any apparent fear of public exposure, that he might edit them down into a book. Does her final request of Leonard signal a change of heart? Had she decided against any form of publication?

It must be remembered that at this period, Virginia Woolf was undergoing significant mental stress. She was beginning to hear voices, had lost her ability to

42 concentrate, and began to fear that she was losing her capacity to write. She was disheartened over her work on Pointz Hall, the novel that would be posthumously published as Between the Acts, and confessed to her doctor, Octavia Wilberforce, that she had “lost all power over words, cant do a thing with them” (L6 456). A possible fair reading of Virginia’s last request of Leonard could be that she was simply not in her right mind at the time that she wrote it, though there are an equal number of Woolf scholars who argue that she was quite sane at the time of her suicide.

Leonard Woolf had been, for the entirety of their marriage, Virginia’s most steadfast literary supporter. He consistently gave solid, constructive feedback, and was also careful to provide her with praise when he felt that her delicate constitution might need it most: after the stressful composition of The Years, Virginia reports that “L. actually likes The Years! He thinks it so far—as far as the wind chapter [1908]—as good as any of my books” (D5 28). Later she adds that “L. put down the last sheet about 12 last night; & could not speak. He was in tears. He says it is ‘a most remarkable book— he likes it better than The Waves’” (D5 30). Years later, in his autobiography, Leonard confessed that “[t]o Virginia I praised the book more than I should have done if she had been well” (Downhill 155). It is difficult to imagine Virginia Woolf, even in the depths of her despair, believing that Leonard would be capable of burning so much as a letter. I suspect that she knew quite well that he would do no such thing, and that the decision of what to do with her diaries—which had, after all, been a perpetual question in the diaries themselves—would now be taken off her hands. As Blodgett notes, “[A]lthough the anticipation of being read by posterity may affect self-presentation, it still allows for some sense of present privacy and therefore potentially for more forthright self-

43 declaration than does the sense of an immediate reader or public audience” (14). Woolf may well have felt an odd kind of freedom in turning the decision over to Leonard: she would no longer have to face whatever the public might make of her private thoughts.

And what might her request suggest about her own thoughts on the content?

Scholars such as Deborah Martinson and Judy Simon (who goes so far as to say that

Virginia Woolf “never told the truth about herself” in the diary [169]) claim that Woolf’s diary, being written with an audience in mind—even if that audience was just Leonard

Woolf—is a compromised document, and thus offers no real hidden truth about its author. Woolf herself, in her frequent debates in the 1920s over “the soul” versus “life,” appears to concur in a minor way: she never does, she believes, get “the soul” in. If that is the case—and that is highly debatable—why then should she choose to have Leonard destroy a record of “life,” if “the soul” is absent? Did she realize, in her last weeks and days, that the diary had been about “the soul” after all, and must be hidden from view?

What, in short, did she feel she had to hide? Woolf was a seasoned enough reader to realize that the nasty elements of people’s diaries—the hateful remarks about friends and family which one doesn’t mean and which are only products of the moment—have a short and local lifespan, and that when all of the players are dead, diaries can be published in full. (Leonard Woolf clearly understood this as well; hence the expurgated

A Writer’s Diary.) It is unlikely that Woolf was worried that her surviving friends would be shocked or embarrassed by her occasional cruelty; it is far more likely that she looked back over the years of work and saw that this was, in fact, “the soul,” which had been masquerading as “life” all along.

Perhaps, since the diary was the constant record of her life, she saw, in her last

44 days, no more use for it—the last entry is on 24 March 1941, four days before her death—and thought that it should follow her to her death, which was, she told Vita

Sackville-West, “[t]he one experience I shall never describe” (D3 117, QB2 226).

Elizabeth Podnieks notes that the most moving detail about Woolf’s final volume is the number of pages left to be filled; she had a habit of ruling off a margin on the left-hand side of each page of a new volume, and the final book contains empty page after empty page, each ruled off with a line, waiting to be filled, “underscor[ing] a life stopped short”

(106).

45 Chapter Two: “Doing my scales” A Writer’s Diary

(It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes & work at certain effects. I daresay I practised Jacob here, —& Mrs D. & shall invent my next book here; for here I write merely in the spirit—great fun it is too, & old V. of 1940 will see something in it too. She will be a woman who can see, old V.: everything—more than I can I think. But I’m tired now.) (D2 319-320)

Virginia Woolf often claims in her diary that what she writes there is not “real” writing, but rather “scribbling,” a way to unwind, to soothe “the fidgets,” to while away the

“casual half hours after tea.” The readers of Woolf’s diaries, half a century later, will beg to differ. Frances Spalding states that while for many years we valued Woolf’s novels most highly among her works “because they were experimental,” a shift might be imminent: we might come to focus on the diaries and letters, for “they have a texture to them, a richness of observation” (“Mind and Times”). The diary of Virginia Woolf as a whole reads like an immensely detailed six-volume novel, full of drama, incident, humor, pathos, joy, sadness. It is perhaps the humor that strikes many first-time readers most, particularly those familiar only with Woolf’s most famous novels, which are not noted for eliciting laughter. One is not always prepared for the scathing, fierce wit that permeates these pages. Woolf on a visit from Katherine Mansfield: “We could both wish that ones first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a—well civet cat that had taken to street walking” (D1 58). On a visit to the Fisher Williams’s home (friends of

Leonard and Virginia’s through the League of Nations): “Then the F.W.’s possessed only the brain of one moderate sized rabbit between them. […] [H]e is so discreet, so sensitive, so low in tone & immaculate in taste that you hardly understand how he has the boldness to beget children” (D1 210). On the playing of the National Anthem at the

Queen’s Hall: “I think patriotism is a base emotion” (D1 5). On the “fashionable ladies”

46 who “haunt” the Days lending library: “A more despicable set of creatures I never saw.

They come in furred like seals & scented like civets, condescend to pull a few novels

about on the counter & then demand languidly whether there is anything amusing?” (D1

17). All of these instances from roughly the first two hundred pages of the first volume of the diary.

Among all the pleasures that the diary affords—the humor, the biting wit, the thrilling descriptions of the life of the London streets (“the tumult & riot & busyness”

[D1 9]) and long Bloomsbury evenings, the beauty of the Sussex landscape, the attempts to pin down the brilliant talk of her friends (particularly that of Lytton Strachey), the recollections of political meetings and the unfolding of her own political awakening, the powerful images of England in wartime, the record of the pain of feeling “madness” returning—one of the most satisfying is of watching Woolf, in the pages of the diary, become a modern artist. It is in the diary that she develops her composition process, outlines her novels, perfects and develops her method. Even a reader with only a nodding familiarity with her professional work can see how essential the diary was for her writing life. Leonard Woolf astutely remarks in his preface to his excerpts from her diary, A Writer’s Diary (1953), that

She used her diary partly, in the normal way of diarists, to record what she did and what she thought about people, life, and the universe. But she also used it in a very individual way as a writer and artist. In it she communed with herself about the books she was writing or about future books which she intended to write. She discusses the day-to-day problems of plot or form, of character or exposition, which she encounters in each of her books as she conceives them or writes or revises them. (viii)

The diary was her practice-ground, the place where she developed and tried out the methods that would flower into her modernist masterpieces. It is telling that she did not

47 keep a diary during the years she was writing the bulk of the drafts of Melymbrosia, the

book that would eventually become her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), and that

while she did keep one for part of the period when she was writing her second, Night and

Day (1919), the diary contains next to no comment on the work in progress. These two

books, Woolf’s most conventional fiction, stand apart from the rest of her oeuvre, and

their lack of representation in the diary is indicative of the difference in her method when

her career as a fiction writer began. During the writing of Night and Day, Woolf did not yet seem to have a handle on how to use her diary as a writing tool. As her work progressed through the experimental stories “The Mark on the Wall” (1917), “Kew

Gardens” (1919), the stories collected in Monday or Tuesday (1921), and her third novel,

Jacob’s Room (1922), Woolf began consciously to use the diary in ways that served her art, pointed her in new directions, and gave her a place of safety to return to during the rigors of production.

This chapter intends to illustrate how the diary served as a practice-ground for specific texts, from the first glimmer of the idea, through the lengthy composition process, to the book’s publication and critical reception. To this end, I will briefly examine the composition history as recorded in the diary of all of her major works of fiction, to demonstrate the diary’s vital importance in Woolf’s creative process.1 The following chapter will examine the ways in which the diary helped in the development of

Woolf’s modernism and to suggest that it too can be read as a modernist work in its own right, perhaps even on par with any of her professional works. Quentin Bell, in his introduction to Volume One of the diary, calls it “a masterpiece,” and states, “In calling it

1 I confine my discussion here to Woolf’s fiction, and thus will not address the composition of Woolf’s feminist essays, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) and the autobiographical pieces such as “A Sketch of the Past” (collected in Moments of Being [1976]).

48 a masterpiece I mean to indicate that it is a literary achievement equal to though very

different from The Waves or To The Lighthouse, having the same accurate beauty of

writing but also an immediacy such as one finds only in diaries” (xiii).

A few words should be said at the outset about the 1953 collection of excerpts

from Woolf’s diary edited by Leonard Woolf as A Writer’s Diary, which gives this

chapter its subtitle. In his preface, Leonard claims, “I have been carefully through the 26

volumes of diary and have extracted and now publish in this volume practically

everything which referred to her own writing” (viii). Leonard Woolf’s accounting of the

number of volumes has proved, atypically for so methodical a man as Leonard,

inaccurate. In an appendix to Volume One of her edition of the diaries from 1915 to

1941, Anne Olivier Bell describes the appearance and whereabouts of thirty separate

volumes of diary, which constitute what she calls the “main series.” These are,

presumably, the volumes that Leonard Woolf sold to the New York Public Library

“through the agency of the Misses Hamill and Barker” of Chicago (D1 viii). A

Passionate Apprentice (1990) is made up, according to its appendix, of the seven extant

journals from 1897 to 1909. In addition, a further notebook for 1909 was discovered in

2002, and has appeared as Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches, edited by David

Bradshaw and introduced by Doris Lessing, thus making the total number of journals or

diaries thirty-eight. Mitchell Leaska suggests that Leonard had typescripts of all the

journals prepared before he sold them (PA vii-viii), and Bradshaw confirms that Leonard was aware of the Carlyle’s House journal (xxviii), which suggests that it was not lack of knowledge of them that kept Leonard from including them in his total in the preface to A

Writer’s Diary. It is possible that he simply viewed these earlier notebooks as not being

49 diaries at all, but rather notebooks, sketchbooks, or journals; this is an opinion which

seems to have been carried forward by Anne Olivier Bell, who calls the early material

“notebooks having something of the character of diaries but consisting largely of literary

exercises or essays arising from events, people, and places that she observed” (D1 vii).

But, as will be seen, even the briefest of glances at the material contained in A Passionate

Apprentice and Carlyle’s House reveals that while it may seem different from that of the

“main series,” it is still intensely connected to Woolf’s own writing life, and is essential

to an examination of her growth and development as a writer. Thus, A Writer’s Diary

can hardly be seen to contain “practically everything which referred to her own writing.”

Some anti-Leonard critics might view the omission of the pre-1915 material (which, after

all, pre-dates his marriage to Virginia in 1912) as ominous, but I suspect that Leonard,

who was so devoted to keeping the flame of his wife’s posthumous literary reputation lit,2 merely viewed the early journals as not formal diaries and thus excluded them from consideration in his edition and in his tallies. (It is also possible that as Woolf’s published fiction did not begin appearing until 1915, Leonard felt that his edition should begin at a period where the work readers would be most familiar with would be discussed.) Fortunately, one need not subscribe to Leonard Woolf’s opinion when surveying the published body of work, and thus it is the assumption of this work that the main series and the earlier notebooks all constitute the diary of Virginia Woolf as a whole.

“Slashing at Melymbrosia”: The Voyage Out (1915)

In her diary in 1922, Virginia Woolf recalls walking along the coast at Manorbier

2 For an excellent overview of the role Leonard Woolf played in maintaining his wife’s posthumous reputation, see Regina Marler’s Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), especially pages 21-42.

50 in 1904, shortly after her father’s death, and being seized by the vision of “writing a book—a book—But what book?” (D2 197). The novel that she would begin roughly three years later and which would go through numerous drafts and a title change before appearing in 1915 as her first novel, The Voyage Out, is among the least documented of her works, in terms of its composition process, for while she kept a diary during the early stages of its composition, she did not use the diary to record its progress. It is perhaps all too easy to psychoanalyze the vision of the young Virginia Stephen, whose father had just died. Is it a coincidence that she only began to consider writing something longer than a book review at the moment when she no longer had a dominant Victorian man of letters to answer to? As it happened, another man did significantly influence the composition of The Voyage Out (a situation that, as will be seen, has been fiercely debated by scholars), and this influence can be traced not through Woolf’s diary, but through surviving letters.

If Virginia Stephen kept a diary from her return from Italy in 1909 to early 1915, it has not survived. Anne Olivier Bell appears to believe that one was not kept during this period, and thus, Woolf’s documentation of the years of work on The Voyage Out is confined to the letters, and it is my intention to examine the ways in which Woolf talks about this work-in-progress to her friends, in order to contrast this self-analysis with the later diary entries on later books. Knowledge of an audience for the letters significantly alters the ways in which she discusses her work, and therefore a brief examination of the letters will prove useful to an understanding of the diary.

Nigel Nicolson proposes that the origin of both the book’s eventual title and its content appears in a letter to Violet Dickinson on 10 April 1905. In it, she describes a sea

51 voyage to Italy, and writes, “We have managed our journey quite successfully, though we

discovered on the voyage out that we ought to have booked passage on the return boat

[…]” (L1 186). Though it is tempting to believe that the novel was born at this moment,

thanks to the reference to the book’s eventual title, there is little other evidence to suggest

this (and Woolf did take a great number of other sea voyages), and the book, when she

first embarked upon it, was called Melymbrosia, not The Voyage Out. It appears that she began writing the book sometime in the summer of 1907; by October, she is able to write to Violet of its already being in progress. It is impossible to determine precisely how many drafts of Melymbrosia 3 Woolf completed. Louise DeSalvo’s extensive work on

the Voyage Out manuscripts in the New York Public Library reveals at least four separate

versions, and “two of these are virtually complete” (First Voyage x), as well as fragments

of others.4 Leonard Woolf claimed that by 1913, when he and Virginia were married and

living at Clifford’s Inn, “Virginia was rewriting the last chapters of The Voyage Out for

the tenth or, it may have been, the twentieth time” (Growing 87). This may be a bit of a

husband’s exaggeration: perhaps more accurate is his memory that “she once opened a

cupboard and found in it (and burnt) a whole mountain of MSS; it was The Voyage Out

which she had rewritten (I think) five times from beginning to end” (Growing 81).

Leonard refers her most likely to the typescripts, which Woolf routinely burned

3 The name, Julia Briggs believes, is “an invented compound word, combining the Greek and Latin names for honey and ambrosia (the food of the gods which conferred immortality) and playing on the names of the Ambroses” (5), the aunt and uncle of Rachel Vinrace, the novel’s heroine.

4 For an explanation and illustration of DeSalvo’s process of reconstructing the early chapters of The Voyage Out, see her Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (London: Macmillan, 1980). DeSalvo’s edition of a reconstructed draft of Melymbrosia has been published in a “scholar’s edition” by the New York Public Library (1982); a non-annotated edition for the “common reader” with augmentation from the final, published version of The Voyage Out and also edited by DeSalvo, was published by Cleis Press in 2002. Like much of her work on Woolf, DeSalvo’s editing and interpretation of The Voyage Out has been controversial; Hermione Lee diplomatically calls her work “detailed though schematically- interpreted” (791).

52 throughout her life; as for the number, either Leonard is mistaken, or there was yet

another version to which DeSalvo did not have access.

Many of Woolf’s letters about her progress on The Voyage Out are addressed to

Clive Bell, a member of her brother Thoby Stephen’s Cambridge circle and an original

member of what became the Bloomsbury Group, who married Woolf’s sister Vanessa in

1907. The novel-in-progress is first mentioned to Bell in a letter from 15 April 1908, and

it significantly sounds a note that would resound throughout all of her writing life, the

fear of the current work’s reception: “I dreamt last night that I was showing father the

manuscript of my novel; and he snorted, and dropped it on to a table, and I was very

melancholy, and read it this morning, and thought it bad” (L1 325). Less than a month

later, again to Clive, she says that she “half think[s] to burn it” (L1 330). For the next

few weeks, her letters to Clive and to Violet Dickinson are full of complaints about the

difficulties of writing the novel; the words she uses are violent and destructive: “I am

struggling with my work of the Fancy and the Affections” (L1 331); “I have been

slashing at Melymbrosia!” (L1 334); “I screwed out a page of Melymbrosia—did you

know that was the name?—this morning, but with such rage, such interruptions, that I

must bargain for an upper room” (L1 340).5 This stance toward her own work—the self- deprecating, complaining tone—will recur in the diary for nearly every book she will produce. It is interesting that in this period, though she was still keeping a diary 6, she

refrained from using it to discuss her work, and instead used these letters to Clive and

5 At the time of this letter, Woolf was living, quite inharmoniously, with her brother Adrian at 29 Fitzroy Square. Privacy was an issue.

6 The journals for 1908 and 1909 consist almost entirely of travel diaries of Woolf’s journeys to Wells, Manorbier, and Italy, with no discussion of the composition of Melymbrosia / The Voyage Out. Mitchell Leaska helpfully points out a few instances from these travels that may have worked their way into the manuscript. See A Passionate Apprentice, pages 375-401. It could however be said that the diaries from this period did influence the composition of the novel, in that they recount journeys.

53 Violet in precisely the way that she would use the diary later. Possibly, given that her diary had by this point turned solely into an exercise book and a travel journal, she felt that her wide correspondence was the best place to discuss her literary production; in addition, she might easily have felt that such regular updates to her friends and family would validate her as a writer, both in their eyes and in hers. What is absent from these letters, which are often just progress reports (she has “done one hundred pages,” she writes to Violet on 30 August 1908 [L1 367]) or complaints about the difficulty of the work, is any sense of her struggles with the material outside of the actual manuscript, which is such a prominent feature of her later diaries. One gets the sense that with this first novel, she did the struggling and sorting in the drafts of the book itself, and in her head, rather than in any kind of ancillary writing.

By this point, given her vast amount of reading, it would be fair to say that Woolf had internalized a certain kind of voyage plot (and many critics, including Hermione Lee and Mark Hussey, suggest that her reading of the Elizabethan essayist Hakluyt influenced the plot of The Voyage Out), and that as she was not doing much formal experimentation in the writing, she did not need an extensive practice-ground for her endeavors. And yet, she tells Violet Dickinson on 7 July 1907 that she longs to be “a writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages” (L1 299); she also tells Lytton Strachey on 28 February

1916 that she’d planned for her first novel to

give the feeling of a vast tumult of life, as various and disorderly as possible, which should be cut short for a moment by the death [of the protagonist, Rachel Vinrace], and go on again—and the whole was to have a sort of pattern, and be somehow controlled. The difficulty was to keep any sort of coherence, —also to give enough detail to make the characters interesting—which Forster says I didn’t do.7 I really wanted three volumes. Do you think it is impossible to get this sort

7 E. M. Forster’s review of The Voyage Out appeared in the Daily News and Leader on 8 April 1915, where he famously said “Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a

54 of effect in a novel; —is the result bound to be too scattered to be intelligible?

These struggles—for order paired with chaos, for a pattern coexisting with disorder— would of course become the focus of her writing life and her modernism. Her remarks to

Strachey indicate that while most scholars look at The Voyage Out as her most traditional work (along with its follow-up, Night and Day), Woolf herself was already beginning to think in terms of changing the form of the novel, and of writing prose that would “one day burn the pages.”

What is perhaps most remarkable about the composition of The Voyage Out is the extent to which Woolf involved Clive Bell in the process. In an undated later from

October 1908, she asks, “Will you think me a great bore if I turn to the dreary subject again, and ask you whether you have anything to say about that unfortunate work?” (L1

371). Bell replies that he finds it “hard to believe that you really attach importance to my opinion of your work,” but he proceeds to describe the “immature,” “crude,” and

“jagged” spots in the novel (QB1 207). He ends by praising the “first 3 pages [which] are so beautiful as almost to reconcile with your most feverish prose” (QB1 208). Later, in

February 1909, he calls the novel “wonderful,” but not before taking Woolf to task for her “didactic” treatment of what might be called the battle of the sexes:

Our views about men & women are doubtless quite different, and the difference does’nt [sic] matter much; but to draw such sharp & marked contrasts between the subtle, sensitive, tactful, gracious, delicately perceptive, & perspicacious women, & the obtuse, vulgar, blind, florid, rude, tactless, emphatic, indelicate, vain, tyrannical, stupid men is not only rather absurd, but rather bad art, I think. (QB1 209).

Woolf replies quite graciously, but with hints that she will continue to follow her own

different path, a book which, while written by a woman and presumably from a woman’s point of view, soars straight out of local questionings into the intellectual day” (qtd. in Hussey 339). But he had other bones to pick with the novel, on which Woolf characteristically focused.

55 vision, despite Bell’s objections:

You are really angelic to take so much pains to give reasons and advice. They seem to me excellent; for you have laid your finger on spots already suspected by me. […]When I read the thing over (one very grey evening) I thought it so flat and monotonous that I did not even feel ‘the atmosphere’: certainly there was no character in it. Next morning I proceeded to slash and rewrite, in the hope of animating it; and (as I suspect for I have not re-read it) destroyed the one virtue it had—a kind of continuity; for I wrote it originally in a dream like state, which was at any rate, unbroken. My intention now is to write straight on, and finish the book; and then, if that day ever comes, to catch if possible the first imagination and go over the beginning again with broad touches, keeping much of the original draft, and trying to deepen the atmosphere—Giving the feel of running water, and not much else. I have kept all the pages I cut out; so the thing can be reconstructed precisely as it was. Your objection, that my prejudice against men makes me didactic ‘not to say priggish’, has not quite the same force with me; I dont remember what I said that suggests the remark; I daresay it came out without my knowledge, but I will bear it in mind. I never meant to preach, and agree that like God, one shouldn’t. (L1 382-383)

The excerpt is striking in its similarity to the kinds of things that Woolf will say later in her diary, in connection with other books. There is a combination of strength and fragility: the need to win approval from the people she cares about, and the determination to pursue her art in her own fashion. She claims, “The only possible reason for writing down all this, is that it represents roughly a view of one's own. My boldness terrifies me.

I feel I have so few of the gifts that make novels amusing” (L1 371). In addition, she outlines a method here (“My intention now is to write straight on, and finish the book”), which is the sort of direction she will give herself in the pages of the diary.

In his 1972 biography of his aunt, Clive and Vanessa’s son Quentin Bell detailed

Clive’s role for the first time, even including an appendix to Volume One of the biography entitled “Clive Bell and the Writing of The Voyage Out” (QB1 207-212), which prints Clive’s responses to Virginia’s letters. The influence of Clive Bell on

Woolf’s writing of the novel has been a point of contention with Woolf scholars from the

56 time of the Bell biography’s publication. Perhaps the most influential critic has been

Ellen Hawkes Rogat, whose essay “The Virgin in the Bell Biography” raises a number of

issues regarding Quentin Bell’s assumptions about his father’s role. The following

excerpt illustrates Quentin Bell’s assessment of Clive’s relationship with Virginia:

Clive at this time was her authority, and guided her reading in modern French literature. Also, and this was much more important, he became her literary confidant [sic]. Letters have been preserved which show that in 1908 and 1909 he was offering and she was accepting very long and detailed criticisms of the early drafts of The Voyage Out. There was a good deal that he did not like, passages which seemed to him crude, immature, or derivative. But on the whole he was very enthusiastic; he considered that her words had a force “that one expects only in the best poetry” and come “as near the truth underlying them as it is possible for words to come.” It is clear that she was fortified by his praise and very glad to have some assurance that her writing was not “all vapour”; also she was able to accept and, it would appear, to use some of his strictures. (QB1 139- 140)

Much of Quentin’s evaluation of Clive’s role must, it must be said, be attributed to a son’s fondness for his father, for as Rogat and DeSalvo have pointed out, Clive Bell’s role, while significant, is perhaps not the authoritative one his son claims for him. Rogat claims that “Quentin Bell’s characterization of his father is not only controversial; more importantly, it affects the biography because Quentin Bell often makes a case for him at

Woolf’s expense” (105). Rogat takes a longer view and examines Woolf’s changing opinion of Clive Bell’s merit as a critic of her work:

Undoubtedly Woolf appreciated Clive Bell’s attention and interest in her writing. But she did not, in general, consider him a perceptive critic of her work. After the publication of Night and Day in 1919, she noted his praise in her diary (A Writer’s Diary, London: Hogarth Press, 1965), but then remarked, “The people whose judgment I respect won’t be so enthusiastic as he is” (p. 19). More particularly, she felt that his response to her fiction was limited by his failure to understand her views of masculine society. The letters between the two about the early drafts of The Voyage Out included in the biography’s appendix indicate their important differences of opinion. In 1909, answering his criticism that it was “priggish” and “didactic” to depict men as only “vain, tyrannical, [and] stupid,” she argued, “Possibly, for psychological reasons which seem to me very

57 interesting, a man, in the present state of the world, is not a very good judge of his sex; and a ‘creation’ may seem to him ‘didactic’” (I, Appendix D, 209, 211). (105)

While Rogat believes that Woolf largely ignored Bell’s advice in the writing and revision of The Voyage Out, Louise DeSalvo blames Bell for causing Woolf to doubt her instincts and to tone down the feminism of the original work:

Why Virginia Stephen chose not to publish Melymbrosia, she never disclosed. Perhaps she was not entirely pleased with her efforts and thought she could do better. Perhaps it was because the novel was too close to her own experience. Perhaps she feared making it public because of the nature of her material. Perhaps, too, it was because Clive Bell’s critique of her male portraits forewarned her that the ironic portraits of the educated men of her class presented in the novel would cause male critics of the work (who would come from the very class she satirized) to spurn it and she did not feel able to endure public ridicule. (Melymbrosia xxii)

The result, DeSalvo feels, is that The Voyage Out is a compromised work, one that in its earlier versions pushed a more aggressive form of feminism and social critique but that was sacrificed in the interests of safety.8 Whether Clive Bell influenced the final shape of the book or not, what is clear is that it was the last time Virginia Woolf ever showed the early drafts of a novel to anyone. Not even her husband was privy to a book before its completion. Perhaps she was more stung by Clive Bell’s criticism than she cared to admit. But from this point on, she showed manuscripts only to Leonard Woolf, and only when they were finished.

In later years, Woolf was equivocal about her feelings for The Voyage Out. From the time of its publication, she does not mention it in the diary until February 1920, when she reads the novel again prior to its American appearance:

8 While there is some validity to DeSalvo’s claim, and it is interesting to read her theories in light of Woolf’s later comments about the “Angel in the House” in her essay “Professions for Women” (see The Death of the Moth, pages 235 ff), I do not particularly feel that the Melymbrosia drafts of The Voyage Out are quite as extensive a feminist manifesto as DeSalvo claims. But such a discussion is beyond the scope of this study.

58 The mornings from 12 to 1 I spend reading the Voyage Out. I’ve not read it since July 1913. And if you ask me what I think I must reply that I don’t know—such a harlequinade as it is—such an assortment of patches—here simple & severe—here frivolous & shallow—here like God’s truth—here strong & free flowing as I could wish. What to make of it, Heaven knows. The failures are ghastly enough to make my cheeks burn—& then a turn of the sentence, a direct look ahead of me, makes them burn in a different way. On the whole I like the young womans mind considerably. How gallantly she takes her fences—& my word, what a gift for pen & ink! I can do little to amend; & must go down to posterity the author of cheap witticisms, smart satires & even, I find, vulgarisms—crudities rather—that will never cease to rankle in the grave. Yet I see how people prefer it to N. & D. —I don’t say admire it more, but find it a more gallant & inspiriting spectacle. (D2 17)

Her attention in 1920 was largely on “N. & D.”—Night and Day—and in typical form, she saw the current work as the failure and the past work as the achievement. It was with this next work that Woolf was superficially at her most conventional; it is also the novel about which we know the least.

“We had not thought to look upon its like again”: Night and Day (1919)

Night and Day emerges from a particularly dark period in Woolf’s life. She began to keep a regular diary again on 1 January 1915, but it was broken off roughly six weeks later when she suffered a major breakdown;9 she was cared for by nurses through the summer of 1915, and she recuperated at their country house, Asheham, in Sussex, through 1916 and into 1917. The diary does not resume until the summer of 1917, and then only consists of short summaries of weather and other natural phenomena. In

October 1917, upon returning to Richmond, she once again began a formal diary, the one that she would keep with little interruption for the rest of her life.

The novel is first mentioned on 2 January 1915, one day after she begins the new diary. As Leonard writes his “Folk Story review,” Woolf does “about 4 pages of poor

9 The final entry for 15 February 1915 ends with Woolf describing how she “bought a ten & elvenpenny blue dress, in which I sit at this moment” (D1 35). Her voice is not heard again in the diary for another year and a half. The effect of this on the printed page is chilling.

59 Effie’s story” (D1 4). “Effie” is presumably the original name given to Katharine

Hilbery, the novel’s protagonist, modeled closely on her sister Vanessa Bell, to whom the novel is dedicated (“But, looking for a phrase, I found none to stand beside your name”).10 A few days later, Woolf notes that she is reading “about 1860—the Kembles—

Tennyson & so on; to get the spirit of that time, for the sake of The Third Generation”

(D1 19). Julia Briggs notes that in its early stages, Night and Day (which was alternately

titled The Third Generation and Dreams and Realities) was “originally conceived […] as

a family saga such as D. H. Lawrence was currently engaged upon in The Rainbow

(1915) and Women in Love (1920); and such as she herself would write in The Years

(1937)” (Reading VW 44). “The Third Generation” of the novel’s title was to be Woolf’s own, and her heroine, based on her sister, would, in a situation that was be reflected in the final version, feel the pressures of the past upon her own present. In the early stages of writing, Woolf seemed to feel a kinship with “Effie,” for she notes that while arguing with Leonard against his writing a pamphlet on Arbitration, she recognizes her

“egotistical habit of always taking the argument of my book. I want to see what can be said against all forms of activity & thus dissuade L. from all his work, speaking really not in my own character but in Effie’s” (D1 22). This rather fascinating linkage between writer and character was unfortunately cut off by her breakdown a few weeks later. But even in these early stages of her return to the diary, Woolf uses the work in ways that serve her writing: she notes the number of pages she completes per day; she monitors her reading so that it serves her project; she notes that the work so occupies her mind that it even affects her arguments with her husband. It is this monitoring of her progress that

10 References to Vanessa Bell as the inspiration for Katharine Hilbery appear in letters from 30 July 1916, 22 April 1918, 19 November 1919, and 2 January 1920; see Letters 2, pages 109, 232, 400, and 412.

60 will later become one of the hallmarks of the diary. Woolf occasionally called her diary

her “time sheet” (she berates herself on 12 April 1919: “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 & go up to London” [D1 263]) or her “work account”

(D2 242), and she frequently notes how many pages she wrote on a given day, how

closely she kept to her reading schedule, etc.

Soon after the diary resumes in late 1917, Woolf notes that she is pleased that the

Times Literary Supplement has not sent her a book to review,11 “as I want to get on with

my novel” (D1 76).12 But here the record of her progress again ends. She does not

mention the novel again until 7 December 1918 (“I get 2 or even 3 books weekly from

the Times, & thus breast one short choppy wave after another. It fills up the time while

Night & Day lies dormant” [D1 224]), and by 7 March 1919, the novel is finished, and is

about to be submitted for publication to her half-brother Gerald Duckworth: “And my

poor old sluggard, Night & Day, is to be taken in a parcel to Gerald [Duckworth], as soon

as I can get through with these niggling, bothersome corrections” (D1 250). It is

interesting that Woolf writes so little about either the composition or the progress of

Night and Day in the diary, for the record of these years is filled with details of her non-

fiction output. From 1917 to 1919, Woolf completed at least one hundred and twenty-

11 Woolf had been reviewing books for the TLS on a fairly regular basis from 1905. She had a complicated relationship with Bruce Richmond, the editor of the journal from 1902 to 1938, but upon his retirement she acknowledged that “I learnt a lot of my craft writing for him: how to compress; how to enliven; & also was made to read with a pen & notebook, seriously” (D5 145).

12 Here Anne Olivier Bell makes a very rare mistake in her annotations. A footnote indicates that this is the first mention of Night and Day in the diary, but earlier she had called “poor Effie’s story” and “The Third Generation” the work that would become Night and Day (D119). But this highlights an interesting split in critical opinion. While scholars such as Mark Hussey (187) tend to agree with Bell’s assessment that Night and Day grew out of these earlier works, Hermione Lee describes “poor Effie’s story” as being a “lost” start for a completely different novel, and uses Woolf’s adoption of Effie’s arguments against all forms of action as evidence for this (339). Indeed, this opinion of Effie’s does not seem conversant with those of Katharine Hilbery, the heroine of Night and Day.

61 three essays for various literary journals,13 and the diary is filled with descriptions of books delivered, deadlines met, etc. And yet Night and Day is rarely mentioned. We know from a letter to Vanessa Bell (L2 290) that she was very close to completing the final chapter on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918; her diary for that day mentions nothing about her book, and instead focuses on the sounds of the guns going off, on the weather, and on a housepainter seen through the window, looking up once at the sky before getting on with his job (D1 216).

The novel is mentioned again in early 1919, when it is about to be published. On

19 March 1919 she “prays” that Katherine Mansfield, with whom she had an uneasy

friendship,14 “don’t do” her novel in a review, for she’s certain that Mansfield will dislike it (D1 257). She addresses the book in depth only once in 1919, on 27 March. Leonard has finally read the manuscript.

Shall I own that I attribute some of this [pleasure] […] also to Night & Day which L. has spent the past 2 mornings & 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 & finished & 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 & 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 & 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; & as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one; & 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

13 See The Essays of Virginia Woolf, edited by Andrew McNeillie, Volumes Two and Three, for a complete listing of essays by year; McNeillie’s research uncovered the numerous unsigned essays that Woolf completed for various journals during this period.

14 This relationship has been the subject of much discussion; see Hermione Lee’s chapter “Katherine,” in her Virginia Woolf (1996).

62 one would accept, if one had the least respect for one’s soul? Now I have done my last odious piece of typewriting, & when I have scribbled this page, I shall write & 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 N. & D. Indeed, no part of it taxed me as The Voyage Out did; & if one's own ease & 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 & wishing to take cover? (D1 259)

This long passage is striking, for it is the first time that she has given any indication in her diary that she took any sort of pleasure at all in the work; indeed, reading the diary one gets the sense that the book was completed entirely off-stage, as it were, as it appears to have occupied so little space in her life. The entry does however set up a pattern: she asks for Leonard’s opinion, he pronounces that the work is good, she vacillates from

“immense pleasure” in his verdict to doubt that his opinion should be taken seriously.

This self-conscious dialogue will occur with nearly every major project, and is connected, particularly with the writing of The Years in the 1930s, with the periods of mental instability she suffered upon completion of a long work. (It is striking that this does not happen with her short pieces, which were written much more quickly and often to strict deadlines. Though it seems clear that she showed Leonard drafts of short pieces, it is equally clear that she did not show him every one, a fact possibly explained by her need for swiftness. With her longer works, she made sure to get Leonard’s opinion, but then often discounted it privately, in the diary.)

From this point, the book receives a few breezy mentions in the diary, largely to do with its publication. On 2 April 1919, she writes humorously of taking the book to her half-brother, for whom she had little respect:

Yesterday I took Night & Day up to Gerald, & had a little half domestic half professional interview with him in his office. I dont like the Club man's view of

63 literature. For one thing it breeds in me a violent desire to boast: I boasted of Nessa & Clive & Leonard; & how much money they made. Then we undid the parcel, & he liked the title, but found that Miss Maud Annesley has a book called Nights & Days—which may make difficulties with Mudies [a prominent lending library in London]. But he was certain he would wish to publish it; & we were altogether cordial; & I noticed how his hair is every blade of it white, with some space between the blades; a very sparsely sown field. (D1 261)

She reports on 7 May 1919 that Gerald has replied that

he has read Night & Day with “the greatest interest” & will be delighted to publish it. I suppose, as I go to the trouble of copying his words verbatim, that I was a good deal pleased by them. The first impression of an outsider, especially one who proposes to back his opinion with money, means something; though I can’t think of stout smooth Gerald smoking a cigar over my pages without a smile. (D1 269).

There is discussion of American interest in the novel (see 10 June 1919, 12 September

1919, and 28 November 1919 [D1 280, 297, 314n]); after some interest from Macmillan,

George H. Doran of New York published Night and Day in 1920, along with the first

American edition of The Voyage Out (“I was considerably pleased with the American publishers, & that the old V.O. should set sail again” [D1 314]). She believes that Night

and Day will be part of a “downpour” of new books appearing on the scene in the fall

(D1 302). Then the reviews appear.

[I]f I could treat myself professionally as a subject for analysis I could make an interesting story of the past few days, of my vicissitudes about N. & D. After Clive’s letter came Nessa’s—unstinted praise; on top of that Lytton’s: enthusiastic praise; a grand triumph; a classic; & so on; Violet’s sentence of eulogy followed; & then, yesterday morning, this line from Morgan “I like it less than the V.O.” Though he spoke also of great admiration, & had read in haste & proposed re- reading, this rubbed out all the pleasure of the rest. Yes; but to continue. About 3 in the afternoon I felt happier & easier on account of his blame than on account of the others’ praise—as if one were in the human atmosphere again, after a blissful roll among elastic clouds & cushiony downs. Yet I suppose I value Morgan’s opinion as much as anybodies. Then there’s a column in the Times this morning; high praise; & intelligent too; saying among other things that N. & D. though it has less brilliance on the surface, has more depth than the other; with which I agree. I hope this week will see me through the reviews, I should like intelligent letters to follow; but I want to be writing little stories; I feel a load off my mind all

64 the same. (D1 307-308)

Despite the fact that she claims to value E. M. Forster’s opinion so highly, it is clear from an entry seven days later that she was greatly disturbed by his criticism of Night and Day;

thus, her conversation with Morgan deserved to be committed to the diary:

Sydney & Morgan dined with us last night. On the whole, I’m glad I sacrificed a concert. The doubt about Morgan & N. & D. is removed; I understand why he likes it less than V.O. &, in understanding, see that it is not a criticism to discourage. Perhaps intelligent criticism never is. All the same, I shirk writing it out, because I write so much criticism. What he said amounted to this: N. & D. is a strictly formal & classical work; that being so one requires, or he requires, a far greater degree of lovabilility15 in the characters than in a book like V.O. which is vague & universal. None of the characters in N. & D. is lovable. He did not care how they sorted themselves out. Neither did he care for the characters in V.O. but there he felt no need to care for them. Otherwise, he admired practically everything; his blame does not consist in saying that N. & D. is less remarkable than t’other. O & beauties it has in plenty—in fact, I see no reason to be depressed on his account. Sidney said he had been completely upset by it; & was of opinion that I had on this occasion ‘brought it off’. But what a bore I’m becoming! Yes, even old Virginia will skip a good [deal] of this; but at the moment it seems important. The Cambridge Magazine repeats what Morgan said about dislike of the characters; yet I am in the forefront of contemporary literature. I’m cynical about my figures, they say: but directly they go into detail, Morgan who read the Review sitting over the gas fire, began to disagree. So all critics split off, & the wretched author who tries to keep control of them is torn asunder. (D1 310)

Woolf is beginning, in these late months of 1919, to use the diary as a professional tool,

though not yet as a writing tool. She notes her book’s current progress through the

world—the American interest, etc.—and she fixates on her reputation, how she is

received, and then reprimands herself sharply for being “boring.” As Hermione Lee has

noted, Woolf lived in constant fear of egotism (what she called, in response to the work

of James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson, “the damned egotistical self” [D2 14]), and yet

she will say “How I interest myself!” (qtd. in Lee 5). It will ultimately become one of her

15 In her introduction to Volume One, Anne Olivier Bell praises “lovabilility” as “a lovely word” (x); Leonard Woolf corrects the spelling of this to “lovability” in his Writer’s Diary excerpt (20), a change that serves as an example of what his “corrections” do to our reading of the diary, which will be discussed in the fourth chapter.

65 goals, expressed in the diary, to extinguish personality while writing, and not “be

anything” (CS 321).

Her fears about Katherine Mansfield’s opinion of Night and Day proved justified

when her review, entitled “A Ship Comes into Harbour” (a title perhaps more appropriate

for a review of Woolf’s first novel), appeared in the Athenaeum. Mansfield compared

Night and Day to Jane Austen, calling it “Miss Austen up-to-date” (qtd. in Hussey 189),

and remarking that

We had thought that this world was vanished for ever, that it was impossible to find on the great ocean of literature a ship that was unaware of what has been happening; yet there is Night and Day, new, exquisite—a novel in the tradition of the English novel. In the midst of our admiration it makes us feel old and chill. We had not thought to look upon its like again. (qtd. in QB2 69).

To her husband, Middleton Murry, Mansfield wrote that Night and Day was “a lie in the soul” (Mansfield/Murry 204). Elsewhere, in further letters to Murry, she expressed annoyance that the novel also denied the existence of the war completely (Alpers 258).

Woolf was stung by Mansfield’s public criticism of the book:

K.M. wrote a review which irritated me—I thought I saw spite in it. A decorous elderly dullard she describes me; Jane Austen up to date. Leonard supposes that she let her wish for my failure have its way with her pen. He could see her looking about for a loophole of escape. “I’m not going to call this a success—or if I must, I’ll call it the wrong kind of success.” I need not now spread my charity so wide, since Murry tells me she is practically cured. But what I perceive in all this is that praise hardly warms; blame stings far more keenly; & both are some-how at arms length. Yet its on the cards, I suppose, that N & D is a marked success; I expect a letter every day from someone or other, & now I can write with the sense of many people willing to read. Its all pleasant; lights up the first sentences of my writing of a morning. Today, bearing K.M. in mind, I refused to do Dorothy Richardson for the Supt. The truth is that when I looked at it, I felt myself looking for faults; hoping for them. And they would have bent my pen, I know. There must be an instinct of self-preservation at work. If she’s good then I’m not. (D1 314-15)

66 It is telling that Woolf refuses to critique the work of a modernist writer—a modernist woman writer, at that—after having been branded a traditionalist by a friend. What also strikes the reader of Woolf’s diaries is Mansfield’s assertion that Woolf’s novel is a ship upon the ocean with no knowledge of what has been going on around it. While this may well be a valid criticism of Night and Day (which is the only novel by Virginia Woolf that does not take the first World War even peripherally into account; even The Voyage

Out has a moment in which warships are seen on the horizon), it is certainly not the case of Woolf’s diary itself: during the years of writing Night and Day, Woolf was acutely conscious of the war, and she reflects upon it continually. The diary is full of images of air raids, in which she and Leonard and the servants spend many evenings sleeping in the cellar; of notes on her friends and family members who were conscientious objectors

(many of whom were living at Philip and Ottoline Morrell’s country house, Garsington, and who were embroiled in the complex emotional, intellectual, and sexual lives of that circle); of accounts of newspaper reports of battleships sunk, battles won, etc. Far from being aloof and separate from the war, Woolf is revealed, in her diary, to be intensely aware of it. But Mansfield was of course reviewing Woolf’s novel, not her diary, and it is only hindsight that allows us to see the unfairness of her stance.

From this point, Woolf would scarcely mention Night and Day again. There is a brief mention of the need to print a second edition (D2 13); by 1925, seeking “greater quiet & force” in her writing, she worries that such qualities will dull her into the

“flatness of N. & D.” (D3 37). The novel is only mentioned once more in the diary, on

22 November 1938, when she is revising her short story “Lappin and Lapinova,” which, she recalls, she wrote initially “when I was writing Night and Day perhaps” (D5 188).

67 The lack of discussion of the novel seems to suggest that Woolf all but disowned it, and

indeed it is the least studied, and probably the least admired, of all of her novels. Her last

word on the book might be said to have come in a letter to Ethel Smyth in 1930:

[…] I was so tremblingly afraid of my own insanity that I wrote Night and Day mainly to prove to my own satisfaction that I could keep entirely off that dangerous ground. I wrote it, lying in bed, allowed to write only for one half hour a day. And I made myself copy from plaster casts, partly to tranquillise, partly to learn anatomy. Bad as the book is, it composed my mind, and I think taught me certain elements of composition which I should not have had the patience to learn had I been in full flush of health always. […] How I trembled with excitement; and then Leonard came in, and I drank my milk, and concealed my excitement, and wrote I suppose another page of that interminable Night and Day (which some say is my best book). (L4 231)

Woolf would not forget the response to her second novel, and even during its

composition, she was beginning to forge a new path, one that would not involve “copying

from plaster casts,” and one that would fully utilize her diary.

“No scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen”: Jacob’s Room (1922)

In her letter to Ethel Smyth in 1930 regarding the process of writing Night and

Day, Woolf writes of the revelation that occurred while writing that conventional book:

These little pieces in Monday or (and) Tuesday were written by way of diversion; they were the treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style. I shall never forget the day I wrote The Mark on the Wall—all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months. The Unwritten Novel was the great discovery, however. That—again in one second—showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it—not that I have ever reached that end; but anyhow I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach, Jacobs Room, Mrs Dalloway etc [.] (L4 231)

The imagery of writing Night and Day (“stone breaking”) contrasts sharply with that of

“The Mark on the Wall” (“flying”), and the prose of these two pieces reflects this. “The

Mark on the Wall,” which first appeared in 1917 as one half of Leonard and Virginia’s

Two Stories, is her first experimental work. And the appearance of Night and Day, a

68 novel in the tradition of the English novel, as Mansfield put it, so soon after the publication of Two Stories, must have been baffling to those who followed Woolf’s work.

“The Mark on the Wall,” and the revolution in Woolf’s writing that it brought about, could not have happened without a conversation between Leonard and Virginia in a tea shop on her birthday in 1915.

On 25 January, Woolf notes that Leonard gave her “a beautiful green purse,” then took her up to London (“free of charge”), where they went to a “Picture Palace” and then to tea at Buszards. “Sitting at tea we decided three things: in the first place to take

Hogarth, if we can get it; in the second, to buy a Printing press; in the third to buy a Bull dog, probably called John. I am very much excited at the idea of all three—particularly the press” (D1 28). Her breakdown a few weeks later prevented the Woolfs from following through on any of these plans (including the bull dog). But early in 1917 they began to think of the press again, and with the funds from an income tax return they bought a handpress and some Caslon Old Face type (for £19.5s.5d.) from the Excelsior

Printer’s Supply Company, which was delivered to Hogarth House, Richmond, on 24

April 1917 (Lee 358). The Woolfs installed it on their dining room table, where it would remain for the duration of their stay at Hogarth House (QB2 41). (On their return to

London in 1924, while Woolf was writing Mrs. Dalloway, the Press offices occupied the

“semi-basement” at 52 Tavistock Square [Lehmann 8-9], where the Woolfs kept a staff that was often at odds with Leonard.) At first, the Woolfs were staggeringly inept as printers; unable to take printing lessons due to “labor regulations regarding trades”

(Rhein 4), they chose to teach themselves by means of the instruction manual that came with the handpress. Leonard’s hands shook due to a nervous condition—which,

69 mercifully, also kept him out of the war16—and thus it fell to Virginia to set the type.

When the press arrived, she promptly lost some of the letters in the drawing room carpet

and “managed, almost at once, to get the lower case h’s mixed with the n’s” (QB2 41).

But in time, the Woolfs developed enough competence to put together Two Stories, their

first publication. It was, in many ways, the signal event of her life as a writer. She would

not articulate the Press’s value in her diary until 1925:

How my handwriting goes down hill! Another sacrifice to the Hogarth Press. Yet what I owe the Hogarth Press is barely paid by the whole of my handwriting. Haven’t I just written to Herbert Fisher refusing to do a book for the Home University Series on Post Victorian? —knowing that I can write a book, a better book, a book off my own bat, for the Press if I wish! To think of being battened down in the hold of those University dons fairly makes my blood run cold. Yet I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series’ & editors. (D3 42-43)

“The only woman in England free to write what I like”: One could safely argue that the

Hogarth Press enabled Virginia Woolf to become a modernist. It is probable that had she

submitted experimental work to her stodgy half-brother Gerald Duckworth (who, it must

be mentioned, gained notoriety in the 1970s after the publication of Woolf’s

autobiographical writings in Moments of Being [1976, 1985], in which Woolf accused

Gerald of sexually molesting her when she was roughly six years old), he would have

either turned it down or accepted it with the proviso that she make changes. It is also

unclear whether Woolf would have even written a piece like “The Mark on the Wall” had

she had to worry about the reaction of editors. As Hermione Lee notes, she had from a

much earlier period been influenced by the modern experimentation of the painters in her

16 See Woolf’s diary entries for 9 October 1917, 11 October 1917, and 6 November 1917 (D1, pages 56, 58, 59, and 72) for her account of the medical examinations Leonard underwent in order to be declared medically unfit for military service.

70 circle, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant,17 so it is likely that she would have

begun experimenting at some point in prose. But the fact remains that the purchase of the

handpress freed her from the tyranny of editors (with the exception of those for whom

she wrote critical essays for journals, and it is telling that her relationship with Bruce

Richmond of the TLS became more complicated and prickly as she gained increased freedom as a fiction writer), and the Hogarth Press would publish all of her books for the rest of her life, and beyond.

From the start, it is clear that “The Mark on the Wall” was written solely for the purposes of its publication in Two Stories. Leonard’s contribution, “Three Jews,” had

been written as early as January 1915; Woolf notes in her diary that he read the story

aloud to her friend Janet Case in Hampstead (D1 31).18 Thus, Leonard’s story was written

already at the time the initial discussion of the purchase of the handpress took place. But

Woolf notes in a letter to Vanessa Bell on 22 May 1917, “We have just started printing

Leonards story; I haven’t produced mine yet, but there’s nothing in writing compared

with printing” (L2 155-56). The apparent nonchalance is interesting, in that it suggests that the story is something that Woolf can dash off in no time (note the “flying” imagery in her later letter to Ethel Smyth), and this is in marked contrast to the terms she would later use to describe the toil of writing Night and Day.

Her diary at this period is characteristically quiet about “The Mark on the Wall,”

as it is about all of her fiction at this time. It does not reveal when the story was

17 See in particular the chapters “Experiments,” “ ‘Bloomsbury’,” and “Subversives” in Lee’s Virginia Woolf (New York: Knopf, 1996).

18 The appearance of “Three Jews” in Two Stories brought out the usual English anti-semitism of the time. An old childhood friend, Fredegond Shove, could comment, “Three Jews—is not that rather too much of a good thing?” (qtd. in Lee 308).

71 composed, or whether it was easy or difficult. (Only the letter mentioned above suggests

that Woolf thought, in advance, that the story could be written quickly.) It is not until

1919, two years after its publication, that she discusses the piece with Clive Bell: “As I

half suspected, he found grave faults in that crude laborious novel of mine;19 & excessive

merits in the Mark; the best prose, he said, written in our day” (D1 240). She finds fault with the story in comparison with “Kew Gardens,” a more recent work, on 12 May 1919, and from this point, the story is scarcely mentioned again. Nor is “Kew Gardens,” the experimental piece which would be published in book form by the Hogarth Press twice: once in 1919 with woodcuts by Vanessa (the sloppy production of which by Leonard and

Virginia would cause an argument between the two sisters [D1 279]), and again in 1927 with elaborate decorations by Vanessa, with the text encircled by the pictures. Woolf noted the production of the 1919 edition and its critical reception; though she was pleased by its success, the demand for more copies brought its own share of problems:

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, & we opened them intermittently through dinner, & quarrelled, I’m sorry to say, because we were both excited, & opposite tides of excitement coursed in us, & they were blown to waves by the critical blast of Charleston. All these orders—150 about, from shops & 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, & second, by the necessity of getting some 90 copies ready, cutting covers, printing tables, glueing backs, & finally despatching, which used up all spare time & some not spare till this moment. But how success showered during those days! (D1 280)

Her third experimental work, “An Unwritten Novel,” was published in the

London Mercury in July 1920 (Hussey 322), and while it is one of the signal early works, its composition is completely missing from the diary. Her only fear is that “An unwritten

19 The “crude laborious novel” in question was The Voyage Out.

72 novel will certainly be abused; I can’t foretell what line they’ll take this time. Partly, its

the ‘writing well’ that sets people off—& always has done, I suppose. ‘Pretentious’ they

say; & then a woman writing well, & writing in The Times—that's the line of it” (D2 29-

30). Woolf had not, by this stage, begun to use her diary as a vehicle for her modernist

writing, and therefore the suggestion could be made that the diary was not an essential

tool in the development of her modernist aesthetic, as these three works—“The Mark on

the Wall,” “Kew Gardens,” and “An Unwritten Novel”—all bear many of Woolf’s

modernist trademarks: the narrative indirection, the dispensing of traditional “plot,”

characterization by suggestion, stream-of-consciousness writing, the play of light and

shade, etc. But, in the case of Jacob’s Room, her first full-length modernist text, Woolf

took to the diary to discuss the problems that her new method posed for her. Though she

still did not use the diary as extensively as on her later books, one gets the sense that

Woolf understood that moving from the short form to the long form in this new style

would entail some rethinking of her writing process and the formation of a new one, one

in which the diary would play a larger role.

What is most striking about the first appearance of Jacob’s Room in the diary is the extent to which the concept for it arrives fully-formed, as it were.

The day after my birthday; in fact I’m 38. Well, I’ve no doubt I’m a great deal happier than I was at 28; & happier today than I was yesterday having this afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel. Suppose one thing should open out of another—as in An Unwritten Novel—only not for 10 pages but 200 or so—doesn’t that give the looseness & lightness I want: doesnt that get closer & yet keep form & speed, & enclose everything, everything? My doubt is how far it will {include} enclose the human heart— Am I sufficiently mistress of my dialogue to net it there? For I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist. Then I’ll find room for so much—a gaiety—an inconsequence—a light spirited stepping at my sweet will. Whether I’m sufficiently mistress of things—thats the doubt; but conceive

73 mark on the wall, K[ew]. G[ardens]. & unwritten novel taking hands & dancing in unity. What the unity shall be I have yet to discover: the theme is a blank to me; but I see immense possibilities in the form I hit upon more or less by chance 2 weeks ago. I suppose the danger is the damned egotistical self; which ruins Joyce & [Dorothy] Richardson to my mind: is one pliant & rich enough to provide a wall for the book from oneself without its becoming, as in Joyce & Richardson, narrowing & restricting? My hope is that I’ve learnt my business sufficiently now to provide all sorts of entertainments. Anyhow, there’s no doubt the way lies somewhere in that direction; I must still grope & experiment but this afternoon I had a gleam of light. Indeed, I think from the ease with which I’m developing the unwritten novel there must be a path for me there. (D2 13-14)

This is perhaps the most extensive discussion of Woolf’s professional writing to appear in the diary to that date. Her diary is, for the first time, the repository for her plans, her thoughts, her ideas about a specific work of fiction. Most remarkable is the solidity of

Woolf’s thinking: the notion that she must do what she has already done in her experimental short fiction, but extend the technique for the length of a whole book. She seems rushed and heady; the idea for “ a new form for a new novel” is clearly exciting for her. The excitement comes through in the words and in their pace. But what is also clear is that she has thought this idea out thoroughly before coming to the page. She does not appear to be working her way slowly to the realization of her new conception: the new idea hit her earlier in the afternoon, and she is now taking to the page to record what she thought. Thus, the diary begins to serve as a repository for this new concept, and she writes it down, to fix it, and to keep it fresh.

But her use of the diary as a tool in the actual creation of Jacob’s Room is short- lived. The later entries consist largely of notes on her progress; it is the first instance of her attempting to chart the progress of a work in her diary, and while she does not use it to the full, the diary does trace the steady work she put into Jacob’s Room, from the spring of 1920 to its publication two years later. She mentions the novel by name on 10

74 April 1920: “I’m planning to begin Jacob’s Room next week with luck. (That’s the first

time I’ve written that.)” (D2 28). But a few days later, the anticipation of the reviews of

“An Unwritten Novel” “check” her from beginning the novel (D2 30); the similarities in style between that short work and the novel she is about to begin are clearly giving her pause. By 11 May, she has begun, but is feeling uncertain about both her progress and the material she is producing.

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly on beginning a new book quiets down after a time, & one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, & the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I’m a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I dont enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult. (D2 35-36)

The entry is key because Woolf directly asks herself, through the diary, how the work will proceed, how she will realize her vision: “How am I to bring off this conception?”

Though she does not, in the subsequent entries, pose the question again or attempt to answer it, the fact that the question is asked at all marks a leap forward in Woolf’s use of the diary from the period when she was writing The Voyage Out and Night and Day.

After noting on 20 May that “I get on with Jacob—the most amusing novel writing I’ve done, I think; in the doing I mean” (D2 40), Woolf reports on a series of interruptions which impede her progress, including a visit from her new friend T. S. Eliot, whom she met in October 1918.

Eliot coming on the heel of a long stretch of writing fiction (2 months without a break) made me listless; cast shade upon me; & the mind when engaged upon fiction wants all its boldness & self-confidence. He said nothing—but I reflected how what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr Joyce. Then I began to wonder what it is that I am doing: to suspect, as is usual in such cases, that I have not thought my plan out plainly enough—so to dwindle, niggle, hesitate—which means that one’s lost. But I think my 2 months of work are the cause of it, seeing

75 that I now find myself veering round to [John] Evelyn, & even making up a paper upon Women, as a counterblast to Mr Bennett’s adverse views reported in the papers. Two weeks ago I made up Jacob incessantly on my walks. An odd thing the human mind! so capricious, faithless, infinitely shying at shadows. Perhaps at the bottom of my mind, I feel that I’m distanced by L. in every respect. (D2 68- 69)

The entry catches Woolf at a difficult point in the writing, and that note that she sounds— that the work she is doing, the new form of fiction that she is attempting, is being done better by others, including Eliot himself, and that her husband is outpacing her in both fame and productivity (and indeed, Leonard was making quite a name for himself in political circles in this period, but before long, he would be eclipsed by his wife’s fame)—is one that will recur throughout the diary, on later projects. It is telling that years later, in 1935, she remembers, during another visit from Eliot, just how she felt when he interrupted her work on Jacob’s Room: “A very nice man, Tom; I’m very fond of Tom, & at last not much knocked off my perch by him. That is, not as I was when he came here & I was writing Jacob’s Room. Now he cant much disturb The Years, though he makes me feel that I want to write a play” (D4 344). Such comparisons and tensions were symptomatic of nearly every relationship Virginia Woolf had with other writers, including Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and Vita Sackville-West, the latter of whom, Woolf thought, may not have been as good an artist as she, but who made more money. Woolf uses the diary continuously as a way of comparing her own work to that of her friends and acquaintances, and her thoughts on Eliot, and the ways in which he could make her feel self-conscious about her art, are consistent with those on other artists of her acquaintance.

The remaining entries in the diary on Jacob’s Room serve largely as progress reports, and the increase in their number from the time of Night and Day demonstrates

76 that Woolf was becoming more comfortable with using the diary as a place in which she

can gauge the pace and quality of her work. She indicates on 5 August 1920 that “I write

Jacob every morning now, feeling each days work like a fence which I have to ride at, my

heart in my mouth till its over, & I’ve cleared, or knocked the bar out” (D2 56); on 25

August 1920 she believes that the book will be finished by “Xmas” (D2 62); by 17

September, she has “reached the party in Jacob & write with great pleasure” (D2 67). On

19 December 1920, she indicates that she is pleased with how the book is coming along

(D2 80), but she has not stuck to her plan to have it finished by Christmas. By 25

January 1921 (her birthday), she can admit that she is “at a crisis in Jacob: want to finish

in 20,000 words, written straight off in a frenzy. And I must pull myself together to bring

it off” (D2 86). But on 5 February, the end is in sight: “I am beginning the last lap; & it is a sprint towards the end, difficult to keep up” (D2 89). Shortly after this, she is once

again disgusted by the novel: “My book is an eyesore, & I wake in the night twitching

with horror at the thought of it” (D2 92). And here begins what would become a fairly consistent pattern in the diary, noted first by Leonard Woolf and later by Quentin Bell and other scholars: when she was on the verge of completing a manuscript, Virginia

Woolf generally found fault with it, and these feelings would begin to transfer to herself, and she would enter a period

of passion and excitement through which she almost always had to pass in the process of writing a novel. This came upon her almost invariably as soon as she had finished writing a book and the moment arrived for it to be sent to the printer. It was a kind of passion of despair, and it was emotionally so violent and exhausting that each time she became ill with the symptoms threatening a breakdown. (Downhill 55).

While Woolf did not “go mad” per se upon the completion of Jacob’s Room, she did

suffer from an odd mix of physical symptoms (from the beginning of 1922 through the

77 summer), which often coincided with her periods of mental instability. The mention, in the entry above, that she wakes “twitching with horror” suggests that it is the completion of the novel that is bringing on the panic.

But by 1 March, she has continued, and “Mrs Flanders is in the orchard” (D2 94), which is the first instance in the diary that Woolf describes a character in a specific scene.

The book had been reported as finished on 4 November 1921, but on 6 March 1922 she is still working on it, despite illness: “I wrote Jacob this morning, & though my temperature is not normal, my habits are: & that is all I care for. No more lounging & drowsing & doctors visits of a morning, I hope” (D2 170). The mingling of descriptions of her work life and her physical and mental states will also become a hallmark of the diary as it develops; one gets the sense that Woolf began to understand, through writing about the process, the connections between her writing life and her mental and physical health.

Remaining entries record the reactions of Leonard, her friends, and the critics.

Jacob’s Room had rather a mixed reception. Those who had followed Woolf’s work with the experimental stories would not have been surprised by the novel, while for others the book, coming on the heels of the traditional Night and Day, caused mostly bewilderment.

In a famous entry, Woolf records with pleasure (and some of her usual skepticism)

Leonard Woolf’s reaction:

On Sunday L. read through Jacob’s Room. He thinks it my best work. But his first remark was that it was amazingly well written. We argued about it. He calls it a work of genius; he thinks it unlike any other novel; he says that the people are ghosts; he says it is very strange: I have no philosophy of life he says; my people are puppets, moved hither & thither by fate. He doesn’t agree that fate works in this way. Thinks I should use my ‘method’, on one or two characters next time; & he found it very interesting, & beautiful, & without lapse (save perhaps the party) & quite intelligible. Pocky [an irritating friend of the writer Hope Mirlees] has so disturbed my mind that I cannot write this as formally as it deserves, for I was anxious & excited. But I am on the whole pleased. Neither of

78 us knows what the public will think. There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise. (D2 186)

What is clear is Woolf’s recognition that while the novel may not be perfect, she has forged a new path for herself. As Jacob’s Room was published, Woolf’s mind was already turning to her next work, the first chapter of a book that she was tentatively calling “At Home: or the Party” (Hussey 172), and which would be published as a separate short story in the Dial in July 1923 (Hussey 179). It was called “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.”

“The sane & the insane side by side”: Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

The seeds for The Hours, the novel that Virginia Woolf began in 1923 and which was eventually published as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), can be found quite early in her diary and in her life. It is the general consensus that Woolf’s friend from her youth, Kitty

Maxse (1867-1922), was the model for Clarissa Dalloway, the conventional wife of the conservative MP Richard Dalloway, both of whom make their first appearance in the opening chapters of The Voyage Out, where they are passengers aboard the Euphrosyne who disembark before the ship reaches South America, and thereby leave story entirely.

In their brief appearance in that novel, the Dalloways are held up for some degree of ridicule by the young Virginia Stephen: Richard is a pompous male chauvinist who clamis that he would rather “be in my grave before a woman has the right to vote in

England!” (47), and who shortly thereafter kisses the protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, in terms that are described almost as an assault. Clarissa, meanwhile, recites inanities about how men are better than women, how proud she is of her husband, and of being English.

Kitty Maxse, the model for Clarissa, “was a representative of aristocratic high society for

79 Woolf and her sister” (Hussey 156). Kitty expressed displeasure at the Stephen girls’ move to Bloomsbury upon their father’s death, claiming that it was not an appropriate place for proper young ladies to live; not only that, but “Virginia might marry an author, and they always talk about themselves!” (qtd. in Lee 160). Virginia would have none of this criticism and distanced herself from Maxse, and used her irritating qualities in the

Voyage Out portrait of Clarissa Dalloway. Kitty met a horrible end when she died after falling over a banister at her home (Hussey 156), and Woolf composed a thoughtful diary entry upon hearing the news:

But the day has been spoilt for me—so strangely—by Kitty Maxse’s death; & now I think of her lying in her grave at Gunby, & Leo going home, & all the rest. I read it in the paper. I hadn’t seen her since, I guess, 1908—save at old Davies’ funeral, & then I cut her, which now troubles me—unreasonably I suppose. I could not have kept up with her; she never tried to see me. Yet yet— these old friends dying without any notice on our part always—it begins to happen often—saddens me: makes me feel guilty. I wish I’d met her in the street. My mind has gone back all day to her; in the queer way it does. First thinking out how she died, suddenly at 33 Cromwell Road; she was always afraid of operations. Then visualising her—her white hair—pink cheeks—how she sat upright—her voice—with its characteristic tones—her green blue floor—which she painted with her own hands: her earrings, her gaiety, yet melancholy; her smartness: her tears, which stayed on her cheek. Not that I ever felt at my ease with her. But she was very charming—very humorous. She got engaged at St Ives, & Thoby thought it was Paddy talking to his boy. They sat on the seat by the greenhouse in the Love Corner. However, I keep going over this very day in my mind. (D2 206)

And the next day:

I was interrupted in this, & now Kitty is buried & mourned by half the grandees in London; & here I am thinking of my book. Kitty fell, very mysteriously, over some bannisters. Shall I ever walk again? she said to Leo. And to the Dr “I shall never forgive myself for my carelessness”. How did it happen? Some one presumably knows, & in time I shall hear. Nessa regrets her, but says that the breach came through Kitty. “It seems rather melancholy that it should come to an end like this” Nessa said; but she was putting Angelica to bed, & we could not dig in our past. (D2 207).

80 It is almost too perfect a bit of synchronicity that Kitty Maxse, so clearly the model for

the brittle Clarissa Dalloway of The Voyage Out, should die shortly after Woolf had

embarked on the book that would feature her as the central, title character. Kitty Maxse

would always be associated with the past for Virginia Woolf, particularly those summers

at St. Ives, Cornwall; Kitty became engaged to Leo Maxse at Talland House, and it is

perhaps Woolf’s fondness for those memories, which she would attempt to retrieve in her

next novel, To the Lighthouse, which causes her to soften the Dalloway character in this

new work. There was some suspicion that Kitty’s death was a suicide—her apology for

her carelessness in the entry above might be seen as evidence to support this—and

indeed, Woolf’s first intention with Mrs. Dalloway was to have Clarissa kill herself at the

end of her party.20

In June 1922, while Jacob’s Room is being typed up and is about to be published,

Woolf, anticipating the criticism, writes, “If they say this is all a clever experiment, I shall produce Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street as the finished product” (D2 178), the

implication being that this new work, to be published soon as a short story, is superior to

the novel that she has just completed. The new novel, which would go through several

titles, incorporate several disparate plot strands, and involve the painful exploration of her

own mental illness, would mark an advance of her use of the diary as a creative tool.

The early diaries contain two incidents that Woolf recorded and later transmuted

into scenes in the novel. On 1 February 1915, she describes a walk through London with

Leonard:

20 The early drafts of Mrs. Dalloway have been published as Virginia Woolf “The Hours”: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, transcribed and edited by Helen M. Wussow (New York: Pace U P, 1996).

81 We went up to London—L. to the London Library: I to Days. I walked with him across the Green Park. In St James Street there was a terrific explosion; people came running out of Clubs; stopped still & gazed about them. But there was no Zeppelin or aeroplane—only, I suppose, a very large tyre burst. But it is really an instinct with me, & most people, I suppose, to turn any sudden noise, or dark object in the sky into an explosion, or a German aeroplane. And it always seems utterly impossible that one should be hurt. (D1 32)

The incident would be reused as the car backfiring in Bond Street while Clarissa

Dalloway shops for flowers at Miss Pym’s store, and it serves, along with the aeroplane spelling out an advertisement for toffee in smoke, as the unifying force which draws the consciousnesses of the people in the street together. In May 1918, Woolf describes a visit from her cousin Harry Stephen, who “is modest; humorous; all his pride for his father & ancestors. He still takes out an enormous pocket knife, & slowly half opens the blade, & shuts it” (D1 150-51), a trait that she gives directly to Peter Walsh, and which irritates Clarissa Dalloway so thoroughly.

But the work does not come into focus in the diary until Jacob’s Room is on the

verge of publication. As noted above, she plans to write about Clarissa again, in “Mrs.

Dalloway in Bond Street.” Mark Hussey notes that around this time, Woolf was also

working on a separate, unrelated short story called “The Prime Minister,” in which a

character who was to become Mrs. Dalloway’s Septimus Warren Smith plots to

assassinate the Prime Minister (172).21 By 16 August 1922, she was beginning to write

the Mrs. Dalloway story:

For my own part I am laboriously dredging my mind for Mrs Dalloway & bringing up light buckets. I don’t like the feeling I’m writing too quickly. I must press it together. I wrote 4 thousand words of reading in record time, 10 days; but

21 For a thorough analysis of how “The Prime Minister” grew into the Septimus material in Mrs. Dalloway, see Suzette A. Henke’s “ ‘The Prime Minister’: A Key to Mrs. Dalloway,” in Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays, edited by Elaine K. Ginsberg and Laura Moss Gottlieb, and introduced by Joanne Trautmann (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1983).

82 then it was merely a quick sketch of Pastons, supplied by books. Now I break off, according to my quick change theory, to write Mrs D. (who ushers in a host of others, I begin to perceive) then I do Chaucer; & finish the first chapter early in September. (D2 189).

Note that Woolf is working on two projects concurrently: she mentions the “Pastons,” which is a reference to her essay “The Pastons and Chaucer,” which would appear in The

Common Reader, her first book of collected essays, and which would be published one

month before Mrs. Dalloway in 1925. Writing both fiction and non-fiction simultaneously would become a recurring pattern through her writing life, often noted in the diary. (This would occur again most noticeably with Orlando and A Room of One’s

Own, and with The Years and Three Guineas, the latter being a case in which the non-

fiction essay springs directly from the fictional work that precedes it.) This entry also

reveals that Woolf is already getting the sense that the material surrounding her

conception of Mrs. Dalloway and her party will be too large and expansive to be

contained in a single short story.22 A few days later she reveals that the work has stalled,

and she tries to explain the reasons to herself:

But I always have to confess, when I write diary in the morning. It is only 11.30 to be honest, & I have left off Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street; & really why is it? I should very much like to account for my depression. Sydney Waterlow spent the week end here; & yesterday we had a days outing at Brighton. At Brighton I saw a lovely blue Victorian dress, which L. advised me not to buy. Sydney reproduced in his heavy lifeless voice exactly the phrases in which Murry dismisses my writing “merely silly—one simply doesn’t read it—you’re a back number.” Then Squire rejected Leonard’s story; & perhaps I dont like seeing new houses built all

22 As has been noted by Julia Briggs (Inner Life 130), among others, the fact that Virginia Woolf’s diary indicates that she began writing “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” by August of 1922 points up the inaccuracy of Michael Cunningham’s fictionalized version of the composition of Mrs. Dalloway in his 1998 novel The Hours, as well as the 2002 film version. In Cunningham’s work, Woolf thinks up the opening line of Mrs. Dalloway (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”) on a June morning in 1923. “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” written in 1922, begins, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself” (MDP 19), which clearly indicates that Woolf had her first sentence in mind well before 1923. But Briggs allows that Cunningham’s version is certainly more appealing as a dramatic device (130), and to be fair, it’s possible that the moment he depicts is the one in which she realizes that “flowers” should replace “gloves.”

83 about; & get edgy about our field. So now I have assembled my facts—to which I now add my spending 10/6 on photographs, which we developed in my dress cupboard last night; & they are all failures. Compliments, clothes, building, photography—it is for these reasons that I cannot write Mrs Dalloway. Indeed it is fatal to have visitors, even like Clive for one day, in the middle of a story. I had just got up steam. All that agony now has to begin again. (D2 190)

Later in this same entry (which runs to nearly four printed pages in published form), she

writes of “writing off the fidgets” (D2 191), and thinks of a plan to begin working on the story again:

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life—yes, thats why I disliked so much the irruption of Sydney—one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one’s character, living in the brain. Sydney comes & I’m Virginia; when I write I’m merely a sensibility. Sometimes I like being Virginia, but only when I’m scattered & various & gregarious. Now, so long as we are here, I’d like to be only a sensibility. (D2 193)

Hermione Lee sees this notion—being a “sensibility” rather than a person, when writing—as central to Woolf’s conception of herself as an artist. She cites a humorous entry from 31 May 1933 as a possible explanation for what being a “sensibility” might mean: “I thought, driving through Richmond last night, something very profound about the synthesis of my being: how only writing composes it: how nothing makes a whole unless I am writing; now I have forgotten what seemed so profound” (D4 161). Lee believes that being a “sensibility” is perhaps “being more concentrated, less externalised”

(5), allowing oneself to be focused on the writing, and not on the pressures of being an individual, with social commitments, relationships, etc. And yet, if writing “makes a whole,” does that not imply that the “synthesis” would include everything, even interpersonal relationships? What implication does this have about Woolf’s writing, specifically her modernism? And when she is writing in her diary, is she “Virginia” or a

84 “sensibility”? And how does this affect how we should read the diary? These questions will be addressed in the next chapter.

It would seem that Woolf’s plan to “rock herself” back into writing worked (and one thinks of the many descriptions of friends and relatives and acquaintances who described Virginia Woolf striding over the Sussex downs in terrible clothes and hat, muttering sentences and paragraphs from the current work-in-progress aloud as she walked), for by 14 October 1922, substantial progress has been made.

Mrs Dalloway has branched into a book; & I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side—something like that. Septimus Smith?—is that a good name?—& to be more close to the fact than Jacob: but I think Jacob was a necessary step, for me, in working free. And now I must use this benignant page for making out a scheme of work. I must get on with my reading for the Greek chapter. I shall finish the Prime Minister in another week—say 21st. (D2 207-208)

This entry, utilized in nearly all critical discussions of the development of Mrs. Dalloway, illustrates the degree to which Woolf’s use of the diary had progressed. It contains plans

(her “work account”) for the completion of a work, and details on how the work is developing and what sort of material it might contain. For the first time, she suggests a link between the characters Clarissa and Septimus, and it is telling that soon after, she mentions completing “The Prime Minister,” which at that stage was not about Septimus

Warren Smith per se. It is possible that we see, on the page of the diary, Woolf making the final connection, the realization that all of these disparate pieces of short fiction

(“Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” “The Prime Minister,” and some of the pieces that would later be published as Mrs. Dalloway’s Party [1973], edited by Stella McNichol, some of which were written after the completion of the novel proper) were in fact all part of one large story.

85 By 7 November 1922, she is writing the “aeroplane chapter” (D2 211); by June of

1923, she is able to discuss the book at greater length, in a very revealing entry.

But now what do I feel about my writing?—this book, that is, The Hours, if thats its name? One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoevsky. And do I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do? No I think not. In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense— But here I may be posing. […] But to go on. Am I writing The Hours from deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squint so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it. Its a question though of these characters. People, like Arnold Bennett, say I cant create, or didn’t in J’s R, characters that survive. My answer is—but I leave that to the Nation: its only the old argument that character is dissipated into shreds now: the old post-Dostoevsky argument. I daresay its true, however, that I haven’t that ‘reality’ gift. I insubstantise, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality—its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself? Answer these questions as I may, in the uncomplimentary sense, & still there remains this excitement. To get to the bones, now I’m writing fiction again I feel my force flow straight from me at its fullest. After a dose of criticism I feel that I’m writing sideways, using only an angle of my mind. This is justification; for free use of the faculties means happiness. I’m better company, more of a human being. Nevertheless, I think it most important in this book to go for the central things, even though they dont submit, as they should however, to beautification in language. […] I foresee, to return to The Hours, that this is going to be the devil of a struggle. The design is so queer & so masterful. I’m always having to wrench my substance to fit it. The design is certainly original, & interests me hugely. I should like to write away & away at it, very quick and fierce. Needless to say, I cant. In three weeks from today I shall be dried up. (D2 248-49)

The question of “fabrication with words” versus “writing from deep feeling” seems tied in Woolf’s diary to the idea of writing as a “sensibility” versus as “Virginia.” Woolf notes that one of Arnold Bennett’s criticisms of Jacob’s Room (from a review in which he claims that “the characters do not vitally survive in the mind, because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness” [qtd. in Hussey 127]) is that there is an emphasis on style over substance, on technique over character development—in short, the standard argument put forth by a traditionalist about a modernist. What worries

86 Woolf here (and what will continue to worry her throughout her career) is that the flash

and technical brilliance might get in the way of the storytelling, when all she in fact

wants is to “give life & death” without resorting to “this appalling narrative business of

the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner” (D3 209). Here, while articulating what she

wants this new novel to achieve in terms of form and plot, Woolf states her modernist

intentions more forcefully than in the previous diary discussion of Jacob’s Room. While

there she conceived on her birthday “a new form for a new novel” (D2 13), here she

places herself in direct opposition to her literary predecessors; it is not a coincidence that

Woolf was beginning at this time to formulate the ideas that would appear as one of her

modernist manifestos, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” which would be published six

months after Woolf wrote this entry. The passage also marks the beginning of Woolf’s

reticence about addressing her own mental instability in the form of the shell-shocked

Septimus Warren Smith; she would give him many of her own symptoms: headaches,

hearing voices, believing that the birds were singing to her in Greek. Despite these

reservations and doubts, she is still able to register pleasure in the work (though it will be

a “devil of a struggle”), to acknowledge that the design (“so queer & so masterful”) is

original, unique, new.

But on 6 August 1923, she is dissatisfied once again:

The demon then always suggests that I shall read The Hours. Sheer weak dribble it seems to me (read in these circumstances). My comfort is that I can have at it in any way I like; & if it still goes wrong, to the fire with it. Nor do I think it wrong altogether. Whenever there is a breach in my content, all disparaging criticisms creep in; meanly enough, the good ones keep off. (D2 260)

Though Woolf had not been ill since February of that year, it is suggestive that she still uses the word “demon” in relation to the impulse to reread the work she has completed on

87 the novel. Might there still have been some lingering doubts, in the form of those voices that so often accompanied her illnesses, the voices that told her that she and her work were worthless? On 29 August, she suggests that talking about the work in the diary might actually be counterproductive to the writing process:

I’ve been battling for ever so long with ‘The Hours’, which is proving one of my most tantalising & refractory of books. Parts are so bad, parts so good; I’m much interested; can’t stop making it up yet—yet. What is the matter with it? But I want to freshen myself, not deaden myself, so will say no more. Only I must note this odd symptom; a conviction that I shall go on, see it through, because it interests me to write it. (D2 262)

Woolf somewhat likens the diary here to the age-old writer’s problem of “talking out” one’s creative impulses rather than writing the book itself. And yet it is clear to any reader that entries such as the one noted above from June 1923 obviously “freshen”

Woolf’s perspective on the work. Despite the fact that talking about the work runs the risk of “deadening” it, Woolf cannot help herself, for the next day she comes to a famous and oft-quoted realization about her method: “I should say a good deal about The Hours,

& my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment” (D2 263).23 The “beautiful caves” represent a tremendous leap forward in Woolf’s modernist aesthetic, for while Jacob’s

Room fashions a character primarily through the reactions of other characters to him (and, ultimately, through his absence), Mrs. Dalloway shows characters’ interior lives intersecting while their bodies often go about completely different business. One gets the sense that Woolf should have liked to go on describing her discovery in this entry, but she is regrettably interrupted by “—Dinner!” (D2 263).

23 Michael Cunningham uses this passage as an epigraph to his novel The Hours (1998).

88 She notes on 11 September that Lydia Lopokova, the ballet dancer who would marry John Maynard Keynes in 1925, is being “observed” as the model for Rezia Warren

Smith, Septimus’ wife (D2 265). One can certainly see Lydia, the perennial outsider in

Bloomsbury due largely to her Russian origins, in Rezia’s strangeness, quietness, and exclusion. But Woolf’s fairly critical thoughts of Lydia Lopokova do not appear in her depiction of Rezia, who is treated by the author with relative generosity. In November,

Woolf is writing Septimus’ first “mad scene,” and she notes the strain of it:

I am now in the thick of the mad scene in Regents Park. I find I write it by clinging as tight to fact as I can, & write perhaps 50 words a morning. This I must re-write some day. I think the design is more remarkable than in any of my books. I daresay I shan’t be able to carry it out. I am stuffed with ideas for it. I feel I can use up everything I’ve ever thought. Certainly, I’m less coerced than I’ve yet been. The doubtful point is I think the character of Mrs Dalloway. It may be too stiff, too glittering & tinsely—But then I can bring innumerable other characters to her support. I wrote the 100th page today. Of course, I’ve only been feeling my way into it—up till last August anyhow. It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it. This is my prime discovery so far; & the fact that I’ve been so long finding it, proves, I think, how false Percy Lubbock’s doctrine is—that you can do this sort of thing consciously. One feels about in a state of misery—indeed I made up my mind one night to abandon the book—& then one touches the hidden spring. But lor’ love me! I’ve not re-read my great discovery, & it may be nothing important whatsoever. Never mind. I own I have my hopes for this book. I am going on writing it now till, honestly, I cant write another line—Journalism, everything, is to give way to it. (D2 272)

Again, the advance in Woolf’s use of the diary is obvious. Never before has she discussed a work in such depth; never before has she so often taken a book’s emotional temperature, and her own, while writing it. Such entries are striking for their back-and- forth, push-and-pull tensions: often within the same entry, the book can be both extraordinary and dreadful. The diary is both an outlet for Woolf’s fears and doubts, and a place to praise her own daring, diligence, and originality. This can be seen above in her shakiness (“clinging as tight to fact as I can”) over writing about material—the mad

89 scene, so close to her own experience—that is dangerous for her. But she then turns the

tables and begins to praise what is wonderful and unique about the work, and thus shakes

off the nervousness about the Septimus scene. Such movements are emblematic of

Woolf’s use of the diary: one day she looks at the book “disconsolately” (D2 289);

shortly thereafter, the novel is

a very interesting attempt; I may have found my mine this time I think. I may get all my gold out. The great thing is never to feel bored with one’s own writing. That is the signal for a change—never mind what, so long as it brings interest. And my vein of gold lies so deep, in such bent channels. To get it I must forge ahead, stoop & grope. But it is gold of a kind I think. (D2 292)

What makes Woolf’s diary so reassuring to writers of all stripes is that she was capable of

doubting work that would achieve the sublimity of Mrs. Dalloway. It is a comfort to

know that such a supreme artist also felt unsure, overly self-critical, and despairing.24

The diary continues during this period to be a work timetable, her “work account,” and she lays out a detailed plan for the completion of the book in May 1924.

But my mind is full of The Hours. I am now saying that I will write at it for 4 months, June, July, August & September, & then it will be done, & I shall put it away for three months, during which I shall finish my essays; & then that will be—October, November, December—January: & I shall revise it January February March April; & in April my essays will come out; & in May my novel. Such is my programme. It is reeling off my mind fast & free now; as ever since the crisis of August last, which I count the beginning of it, it has gone quick, being much interrupted though. It is becoming more analytical & human I think; less lyrical; but I feel as if I had loosed the bonds pretty completely & could pour everything in. If so—good. Reading it remains. I aim at 80,000 words this time. And I like London for writing it, partly because, as I say, life upholds one; & with my squirrel cage mind, its a great thing to be stopped circling. Then to see human beings freely & quickly is an infinite gain to me. And I can dart in & out & refresh my stagnancy. (D2 301-02)

24 This may account for Sylvia Plath’s love of A Writer’s Diary. Current paperback editions print her claim on the back cover, “I get courage by reading Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary…You must read this diary.”

90 There is great charm in the way in which Woolf counts off the months on paper, as

though she is unable to do it in her head (and many people have noted that she was

terrible at math, and always counted on her fingers). Anne Olivier Bell notes that Woolf

did adhere to this schedule, as The Common Reader (her first book of collected essays)

appeared on 23 April 1925, with Mrs. Dalloway following soon after, on 14 May (D2

301n). Readers of Michael Cunningham’s fictionalized account of the composition of

Mrs. Dalloway in his novel The Hours (1998) will note his accuracy here: the Woolfs’

move from the Richmond suburbs to 52 Tavistock Square, London, instigated by

Virginia’s dissatisfaction with being away from the center of things, seems to have had a

salutary effect on her writing: she will now be able, as she suggests in this entry, to move

about the city, among people, while writing this most London-centric of her books.25 But she is also careful to note that while the novel might benefit from her life in London, the diary itself may suffer: “For it seems to me that this diary may die of London, if I’m not careful” (D2 301).

On 21 June 1924 she writes, “I am writing, writing, & see my way clear to the end now, & so shall gallop to it, somehow or other” (D2 305). The image of galloping will be repeated on 13 December, when she is revising the work.

I am now galloping over Mrs Dalloway, re-typing it entirely from the start, which is more or less what I did with the V.O. a good method, I believe, as thus one works with a wet brush over the whole, & joins parts separately composed & gone dry. Really & honestly I think it the most satisfactory of my novels (but have not read it coldbloodedly yet) The reviewers will say that it is disjointed because of the mad scenes not connecting with the Dalloway scenes. And I suppose there is some superficial glittery writing. But is it “unreal”? Is it mere accomplishment? I think not. And as I think I said before, it seems to leave me plunged deep in the

25 While Night and Day and The Years are also set in London, neither of those books features the city as a presence; in Mrs. Dalloway, London is a character itself. This can be explained partly by Woolf’s longing for it, when she began work on the book in the suburbs of Richmond, not unlike Joyce’s ability to describe Dublin while in exile from it.

91 richest strata of my mind. I can write & write & write now: the happiest feeling in the world. (D2 323)

Again, Woolf here reinforces the pattern of posing questions about the work and its

possible reception, and then talking herself out of her fears by focusing on the work’s

merits and strengths. During this same period, the diary describes the writing the

Dalloway party, at the end of the novel:

It is a disgrace that I write nothing, or if I write, write sloppily, using nothing but present participles. I find them very useful in my last lap of Mrs D. There I am now—at last at the party, which is to begin in the kitchen, & climb slowly upstairs. It is to be a most complicated spirited solid piece, knitting together everything & ending on three notes, at different stages of the staircase, each saying something to sum up Clarissa. Who shall say these things? Peter, Richard, & Sally Seton perhaps: but I don’t want to tie myself down to that yet. Now I do think this might be the best of my endings, & come off, perhaps. But I have still to read the first chapters, & confess to dreading the madness rather; & being clever. However, I’m sure I’ve now got to work with my pick at my seam, if only because my metaphors come free, as they do here. Suppose one can keep the quality of a sketch in a finished & composed work? That is my endeavour. Anyhow, none can help & none can hinder me any more. (D2 312)

“The quality of a sketch”: Woolf longs here for the finished novel to have the fluency, the swiftness, the lightness of a sketch—in short, she wants it to possess some of the spontaneity and looseness of the work she does in her diary, that writing which has

“slapdash & vigour,” and which “sometimes hits an unexpected bulls eye” (D1 266). It is worth noting that a critic of Jacob’s Room in the Pall Mall Gazette stated that “no true novel can be built out of a mere accumulation of notebook entries” (qtd. in Hussey 127).

The critic, in effect writing something derogatory about Woolf’s method, was perhaps closer to the mark than he or she realized.

By early 1925, Woolf’s diary records her notes on revision, the first reviews, the acclaim of Leonard, E. M. Forster, and others. But her thoughts are already elsewhere.

92 On the day that she completes Mrs. Dalloway, 17 October 1924, she notes, “I see already

The Old Man” (D2 317).

“What psycho-analysts do for their patients”: To the Lighthouse (1927)

The glimpse of “The Old Man” on 17 October 1924 is Virginia Woolf’s first

inkling of the subject of what would become her next novel, To the Lighthouse (1927),

which many critics and common readers call her masterpiece. One of the novel’s central

figures, Mr. Ramsay, the patriarch of a large, turn-of-the-century family, is clearly based

on Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, while Mrs. Ramsay is such an accurate portrait of

her mother Julia that Vanessa Bell was able to write to Virginia, after reading the novel,

“[I]t seemed to me that in the first part of the book you have given a portrait of mother

which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived possible. It is

almost painful to have her so raised from the dead” (VB Letters 317). The novel has its

roots in Virginia Woolf’s earliest childhood, and the summers spent at Talland House in

St. Ives, Cornwall, the site of her very first memory: of lying in bed and hearing the

waves break on the shore, and the blind blowing in and out of the window, drawing the

cord with its little acorn across the floor.26 Woolf would change the setting of the novel to

the Hebrides (while retaining the flora of Cornwall, prompting a few letters from readers,

pointing this out), but the book is perhaps the most autobiographical fiction she ever

wrote, and writing it entailed the dredging up of many memories, and a mystical

experience which she would attempt to commit to the pages of her diary. But at first

glance, To the Lighthouse is noteworthy for the lack of attention that it appears to receive

in the diary.

26 This moment is described in detail in Woolf’s “Reminiscences,” published posthumously in Moments of Being (1976, 1985), edited by Jeanne Schulkind, pages 64-65.

93 Woolf mentions “The Old Man” again on 6 January 1925, but at this stage, she is

clearly intending a brief sketch of her father (“a character of L.S.” [D3 3]), and not the

full work that it would become. In “Reminiscences,” she would recall how she came to

write the novel: “Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I

sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked. What blew the bubbles? Why then? I have no notion” (MOB 81). Within a few months, the novel has a name,27 and a remarkably

complete conception of what the work will be:

I’m now all on the strain with desire to stop journalism & get on to To the Lighthouse. This is going to be fairly short: to have father’s character done complete in it; & mothers; & St Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in—life, death &c. But the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel—However, I must refrain. I must write a few little stories first, & let the Lighthouse simmer, adding to it between tea & dinner till it is complete for writing out. (D3 18-19)

To the Lighthouse thus appears to be the first of her novels in which the initial conception and the final product bear a strong resemblance. With her prior methods, there had been more floundering, more sketching and meandering, more testing of ideas (Clarissa’s

27 Quentin Bell and others have spotted the original reference both to the novel’s title and to one of its central concerns, in an issue of the Hyde Park Gate News, the family newspaper written by the Stephen children, copies of which survive from 1891-2, and 1895. For 12 September 1892, the following entry appears: On Saturday morning Master Hilary Hunt and Master Basil Smith came up to Talland House and asked Master Thoby and Miss Virginia to accompany them to the light-house as Freeman the boatman said that there was a perfect tide and wind for going there. Master Adrian Stephen was much disappointed at not being allowed to go. On arriving at the light-house Miss Virginia Stephen saw a small and dilapidated bird standing on one leg on the light-house. Mrs. Hunt called the man and asked how it had got there. He said that it had been blown there and they then saw that it’s [sic] eyes had been picked out. On the way home Master Basil Smith “spued [sic] like fury”. (HPGN 108-109) See Hyde Park Gate News: The Stephen Family Newspaper: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, with Thoby Stephen, edited by Gill Lowe, with a foreword by Hermione Lee (London: Hesperus Press, 2005).

94 possible suicide at the party, for instance). Here, the vision is clear from the outset,

perhaps as a result of the material being autobiographical. But a few days later, Woolf

characteristically second-guesses this rapid and thorough conception, and wonders if she

has thought it out too clearly (D3 29). Whatever the case, and despite the doubts, she is

still on 27 June 1925 thinking of the new novel as she attempts to write a description of a

visit from her former brother-in-law, Jack Hills: “(But while I try to write, I am making

up “To the Lighthouse”—the sea is to be heard all through it. I have an idea that I will

invent a new name for my books to supplant “novel”. A new — by Virginia Woolf. But

what? Elegy?)” (D3 34). This final question is, by common critical consensus, one of the keys to understanding To the Lighthouse. If Jacob’s Room can be said to be an elegy

both for Woolf’s brother Thoby Stephen and the fallen soldiers of World War I (an

interpretation never but forth by Woolf herself in her diary), then To the Lighthouse is a

meditation on the loss of her parents, and of the childhood home that ceased to be the

center of the Stephens’ summers following the death of Julia in 1895. From Mrs.

Dalloway (which she describes as being a study of sanity and insanity side by side,

among other things) onward, Virginia Woolf would use her diary to discuss with herself

exactly what she wants each novel to be about, as well as how to go about writing it, and

what she wants the books to say, both in form and content. Her pronouncements on her

own work have, for better or worse, been seized upon by scholars as interpretive aids, to

the point where it is almost impossible to find criticism on To the Lighthouse that does

not mention the “elegy” passage above. Unwittingly, from this point forward, Woolf

provided in the pages of the diary critical lenses through which future scholars would

read her books. Had Leonard followed her final pronouncement (“Will you destroy all

95 my papers” [L6 487]), would scholars have focused so intently upon the elegiac nature of

the work? Perhaps such guided readings were one of the many reasons Woolf did not

wish to see her private papers in print.

She has an ambitious plan on 20 July 1925:

I should consider my work list now. I think a little story, perhaps a review, this fortnight; having a superstitious wish to begin To the Lighthouse the first day at Monks House. I now think I shall finish it in the two months there. The word ‘sentimental’ sticks in my gizzard […]. But this theme may be sentimental; father & mother & child in the garden: the death; the sail to the lighthouse. I think, though, that when I begin it I shall enrich it in all sorts of ways; thicken it; give it branches & roots which I do not perceive now. It might contain all characters boiled down; & childhood; & then this impersonal thing, which I’m dared to do by my friends, the flight of time, & the consequent break of unity in my design. That passage (I conceive the book in 3 parts: 1. at the drawing room window; 2. seven years passed; 3. the voyage:) interests me very much. A new problem like that breaks fresh ground in ones mind; prevents the regular ruts. (D3 36)

Here, from the outset, the design is completely in place, down to the death in what would

become “Time Passes,” and the passage of time as a narrow corridor between parts one

and three of the book. (In the writing notes for To the Lighthouse published in the holograph draft of the manuscript [edited by Susan Dick], Woolf famously draws a diagram of the shape of the novel, as “two blocks joined by a corridor” [48], shaped rather like a large, blocky, capital letter H.) At this same time, Woolf writes, rather cryptically, of having to “split up emotions” in order to write about them in To the

Lighthouse (D3 38). Her imagery quickly turns to that of attack, and her progress is swift:

I have made a very quick & flourishing attack on To the Lighthouse, all the same—22 pages straight off in less than a fortnight. I am still crawling & easily enfeebled, but if I could once get up steam again, I believe I could spin it off with infinite relish. Think what a labour the first pages of Dalloway were! Each word distilled by a relentless clutch on my brain. (D3 39)

96 By February 1926 the work is “invigorating,” but is also tiring her (D3 57, 58). On 23

February the work is such that she is able to write,

I am blown like an old flag by my novel. This one is To the Lighthouse. I think it is worth saying for my own interest that at last at last, after that battle Jacob’s Room, that agony—all agony but the end, Mrs Dalloway, I am now writing as fast & freely as I have written in the whole of my life; more so—20 times more so—than any novel yet. I think this is the proof that I was on the right path; & that what fruit hangs in my soul is to be reached there. Amusingly, I now invent theories that fertility & fluency are the things: I used to plead for a kind of close, terse, effort. Anyhow this goes on all the morning; & I have the devils own work not to be flogging my brain all the afternoon. I live entirely in it, & come to the surface rather obscurely & am often unable to think what to say when we walk round the Square, which is bad I know. Perhaps it may be a good sign for the book though. Of course it is largely known to me: but all my books have been that. It is, I feel, that I can float everything off now; & “everything” is rather a crowd & weight & confusion in the mind. (D3 59-60)

To this point, it has been striking that Woolf has not often discussed any technical difficulties with the novel, and has rarely discussed the book in the same manner as she did Mrs. Dalloway, where the diary is the place where she works out the dichotomy between the sane and the insane characters, develops her “tunneling” method, etc. Here,

Woolf notes that she is writing more quickly than ever, and one gets the impression that the book is largely contained in her head, and that she does not require the working- through of the idea in the diary’s pages. And she writes here of the work-in-progress in a new way: she writes of being submerged, of coming up for air, as it were, something not seen in the language used to describe Jacob or Dalloway.

In April, she writes of completing the family dinner scene (D3 72), and by 18

April has finished the first part of the novel (which would become “The Window”) and is preparing to start the second (“Time Passes”), which, one could argue, would become her most experimental piece of prose to that date. She seems aware that she is on the verge

97 of writing a difficult and innovative section, and uses the diary to remind herself of what her intentions are:

Yesterday I finished the first part of To the Lighthouse, & today began the second. I cannot make it out—here is the most difficult abstract piece of writing— I have to give an empty house, no people's characters, the passage of time, all eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to: well, I rush at it, & at once scatter out two pages. Is it nonsense, is it brilliance? Why am I so flown with words, & apparently free to do exactly what I like? When I read a bit it seems spirited too; needs compressing, but not much else. Compare this dashing fluency with the excruciating hard wrung battles I had with Mrs Dalloway (save the end). This is not made up: it is the literal fact. (D3 75-76)

Disappointingly, she does not detail the writing of “Time Passes”; she only mentions its completion (“sketchily I admit”) on 25 May 1926, and adds that she may be finished with the book as a whole by July: “A record—7 months, if it so turns out” (D3 88). The lack of discussion of “Time Passes” is bewildering. Susan Dick, in her holograph edition of the novel, reprints Woolf’s loose page with an outline for “Time Passes,” which adheres in many ways to the finished product (51). Thus, one could conclude that Woolf’s plan was sufficiently solid in her mind (and in her notes, kept separate from the diary) that she was able to write it through without needing to discuss the work in her diary. But this is, of course, guesswork.

Perhaps because she was so drained by the experience of writing “Time Passes” so quickly, she claims on 6 June 1926 that she “cannot conceive what The Lighthouse is all about. I hope to whip my brains up either at Vita’s or Rodmell this weekend” (D3 89).

On 22 July she notes putting the novel aside until she can leave London and get to the comparative peace and quiet of Monks House, in Rodmell, Sussex. “There,” she writes,

“I shall come to grips with the last part of that python, my book; it is a tug & a struggle,

& I wonder now & then, why I let myself in for it” (D3 96). She sees an end in sight by

98 early September, but it “mysteriously comes no nearer” (D3 106). By 13 September, she

is nearly finished.

The blessed thing is coming to an [end] I say to myself with a groan. Its like some prolonged rather painful & yet exciting process of nature, which one desires inexpressibly to have over. Oh the relief of waking & thinking its done— the relief, & the disappointment, I suppose. I am talking of To the Lighthouse. […] As for the book—Morgan said he felt ‘This is a failure’ as he finished The passage to India. I feel—what? A little stale this last week or two from steady writing. But also a little triumphant. If my feeling is correct, this is the greatest stretch I’ve put my method to, & I think it holds. By this I mean that I have been dredging up more feelings & character, I imagine. But Lord knows, until I look at my haul. This is only my own feeling in process. Odd how I’m haunted by that damned criticism of Janet Case’s “its all dressing. . . technique. (Mrs Dalloway). The C.R. [The Common Reader] has substance”. But then in ones strained state any fly has liberty to settle, & its always the gadflies. Muir praising me intelligently has comparatively little power to encourage—when I’m working that is—when the ideas halt. And this last lap, in the boat, is hard, because the material is not so rich as it is with Lily on the lawn: I am forced to be more direct & more intense. I am making some use of symbolism, I observe; & I go in dread of ‘sentimentality’. Is the whole theme open to that charge? But I doubt that any theme is in itself good or bad. It gives a chance to ones peculiar qualities—thats all. (D3 109-110)

She later states that the book is “provisionally” finished on 16 September (D3 111), and then the process of revision begins. This is quite swift:

I am re-doing six pages of Lighthouse daily. This is not I think, so quick as Mrs D.: but then I find much of it very sketchy, & have to improvise on the typewriter. This I find much easier than re-writing in pen & ink. My present opinion is that it is easily the best of my books, fuller than J.’s R. & less spasmodic, occupied with more interesting things than Mrs D. & not complicated with all that desperate accompaniment of madness. It is freer & subtler I think. Yet I have no idea yet of any other to follow it: which may mean that I have made my method perfect, & it will now stay like this, & serve whatever use I wish to put it to. Before, some development of the method brought fresh subjects in view, because I saw the chance of being able to say them. Yet I am now & then haunted by some semi mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told on one occasion; & time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident—say the fall of a flower—might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist—nor time either. But I dont want to force this. (D3 117-118)

99 The passage is interesting in its revelation about a slight change in Woolf’s composition

process: she has switched, in her revisions, from “pen & ink” to the typewriter, yet

another indication that the book is coming swiftly, and that she seeks to save time. Also,

Woolf often finds herself in the diary thinking of the next project as she completes the

current one; it is therefore possible to read the latter parts of the entry as the origins of

Orlando, the “profound life of a woman” in which time is “utterly obliterated.”

Leonard Woolf’s verdict on To the Lighthouse is duly noted in typical Woolfian,

skeptical fashion:

Well Leonard has read To the Lighthouse, & says it is much my best book, & it is a ‘masterpiece’. He said this without my asking. I came back from Knole & sat without asking him. He calls it entirely new ‘a psychological poem’, is his name for it. An improvement upon Dalloway: more interesting. Having won this great relief, my mind dismisses the whole thing, as usual; & I forget it, & shall only wake up & be worried again over proofs & then when it appears. (D3 123)

She herself is unclear, as usual, about what she actually thinks of the novel: “Do I like

The Lighthouse? I think I was disappointed. But God knows. I have to read it again” (D3

129). Upon its publication on 5 May 1927 (the thirty-second anniversary of her mother’s death), To the Lighthouse was for the most part well-received (even by those notoriously hostile critics, F. R. and “Queenie” Leavis) and it sold well, which enabled the Woolfs to buy their first car (Hussey 310). Woolf characteristically focuses on a “depressing” review in the TLS (D3 134), but on the whole looks at the work favorably. In November

1928, she is able to reflect that she “got down to my depths” with To the Lighthouse (D3

203).

But perhaps the most pertinent comments Woolf ever made about the novel concern how its composition affected her feelings for her dead parents. On her father’s birthday in 1928, she reflects on his life and his death:

100 Father’s birthday. He would have been 1928, 96, yes, today; & could have 1832 96 been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;— inconceivable. I used to think of him & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. (I believe this to be true—that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; & writing of them was a necessary act.) He comes back now more as a contemporary. I must read him some day. I wonder if I can feel again, I hear his voice, I know this by heart? (D3 208)

And she acknowledges in the autobiographical “A Sketch of the Past,” in a passage already partially cited above, that the writing of To the Lighthouse profoundly affected her relationship with her dead mother.

It is perfectly true that she obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen, until I was forty-four. Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked. What blew the bubbles? Why then? I have no notion. But I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her. I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest. But what is the meaning of "explained" it? Why, because I described her and my feeling for her in that book, should my vision of her and my feeling for her become so much dimmer and weaker? Perhaps one of these days I shall hit on the reason; and if so, I will give it, but at the moment I will go on, describing what I can remember, for it may be true that what I remember of her now will weaken still further. (This note is made provisionally, in order to explain in part why it is now so difficult to give any clear description of her.) (MOB 81)

The writing of To the Lighthouse, with its attendant dredging up of emotionally-charged memories, did not appear to try her as the “mad scenes” in Mrs. Dalloway did. The novel was completed in almost exactly two years, and it appears to have flown from Woolf’s pen according to an interior pattern. Her next novel would be a “lark,” a “plunge,” and

101 would be inspired by a new friend, one who first appears in the diary and in Woolf’s life

on 15 December 1922, the “lovely gifted aristocratic” Vita Sackville-West.

“Revolutionising biography in a night”: Orlando (1928)

Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), the novelist, biographer, travel-writer, poet,

world-famous gardener and “Sapphist,” was a descendant of the ancient Sackville family,

whose enormous ancestral home, Knole, in Kent, was denied to her by the law of entail

that prohibited women from inheriting property.28 By the time Virginia Woolf met her in

1922, Sackville-West was already a well-known novelist and writer, more famous, in fact, than Woolf herself. She was also notorious for a sex scandal that occurred in 1920.

From 1918 to 1920, Sackville-West had been engaged in an affair with Violet Trefusis, a liaison that she embarked upon after her husband, the homosexual diplomat Harold

Nicolson, confessed to having contracted a venereal disease from his extramarital affairs, a revelation which, according to Louise DeSalvo, allowed Vita to “completely rewrite the ground rules of their marriage” (qtd. in Hussey 246). Vita ran off to Paris with Violet, both of their husbands in hot pursuit. The Nicolsons stayed together, pursuing extramarital affairs but living with apparent contentment. The story of the marriage is told, often movingly, by their son Nigel Nicolson in Portrait of a Marriage (1973).

Woolf first mentions Sackville-West on 3 August 1922, months before they

would actually meet: “Mrs Nicolson thinks me the best woman writer—& I have almost

got used to Mrs Nicolson's having heard of me. But it gives me some pleasure” (D2 187).

It seems clear that Woolf is surprised, given that she and Sackville-West moved in

entirely different social circles, and were quite different writers. Anne Olivier Bell

28 For a detailed history of the house and the family, see Vita’s own Knole and the Sackvilles (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1922).

102 suggests that Vita’s opinion of Woolf’s work was related to her by Clive Bell, who knew both Harold and Vita (D2 187n). The relationship between Vita Sackville-West and

Virginia Woolf, and the subsequent speculation about the extent of their love affair, is the subject of many books, articles, and even a play by Eileen Atkins, entitled Vita and

Virginia, produced in New York with Atkins as Woolf and Vanessa Redgrave as Vita.

Orlando, the novel written, as Suzanne Raitt suggests, as an attempt to win Vita back after Vita began an affair with Mary Campbell, the wife of the poet Roy Campbell (34), is also, by general consensus, Woolf’s attempt to “give” Knole to Vita, in a way that she could never possess it in life. The book is unique in Woolf’s canon, and in its record in her diary.

Orlando was written remarkably quickly, from mid-March 1927 to mid-March

1928, so quickly that it is scarcely discussed in the diary. It appears to have had its origins in a slightly different project, one rooted in fantasy and play, in the rest after finishing To the Lighthouse:

Faith Henderson came to tea, &, valiantly beating the waters of conversation, I sketched the possibilities which an unattractive woman, penniless, alone, might yet bring into being. I began imagining the position—how she would stop a motor on the Dover road, & so get to Dover: cross the channel: &c. It struck me, vaguely, that I might write a Defoe narrative for fun. Suddenly between twelve & one I conceived a whole fantasy to be called “The Jessamy Brides”—why, I wonder? I have rayed round it several scenes. Two women, poor, solitary at the top of a house. One can see anything (for this is all fantasy) the Tower Bridge, clouds, aeroplanes. Also old men listening in the room over the way. Everything is to be tumbled in pall mall. It is to be written as I write letters at the top of my speed: on the ladies of Llangollen; on Mrs Fladgate; on people passing. No attempt is to be made to realise the character. Sapphism is to be suggested. Satire is to be the main note—satire & wildness. The Ladies are to have Constantinople in view. Dreams of golden domes. My own lyric vein is to be satirised. Everything mocked. And it is to end with three dots . . . so. For the truth is I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books whose from is always so closely considered. I want to kick up my heels & be off. I want to embody all those innumerable little ideas & tiny stories which flash into my mind

103 at all seasons. I think this will be great fun to write; & it will rest my head before starting the very serious, mystical poetical work which I want to come next. Meanwhile, before I can touch the Jessamy Brides, I have to write my book on fiction & that wont be done till January, I suppose. I might dash off a page or two now & then by way of experiment. And it is possible that the idea will evaporate. Anyhow this records the odd hurried unexpected way in which these things suddenly create themselves—one thing on top of another in about an hour. So I made up Jacob’s Room looking at the fire at Hogarth House; so I made up The Lighthouse one afternoon in the square here. (D3 131-32)

Woolf was able, in 1933, to look back at this passage and note in the margin, “Orlando

leading to The Waves. (July 8th 1933)” (D3 131). The conception is swift, rapid, playful, humorous—all qualities that Orlando will share. It is telling that the idea for “The

Jessamy Brides” occurs after she records her annoyance at not having heard from Vita that day (D3 130); “Sapphism is to be suggested.” From the start, the writing of Orlando is a way to keep hold of Vita, to tame her and impress her. Nigel Nicolson goes so far as to call the finished book “the longest and most charming love letter in literature”

(Portrait 202).

By 20 September 1927, her conception has shifted, and she has given Vita her new fictional name.

One of these days, though, I shall sketch here, like a grand historical picture, the outlines of all my friends. I was thinking of this in bed last night, & for some reason I thought I would begin with a sketch of Gerald Brenan. There may be something in this idea. It might be a way of writing the memoirs of one’s own times during peoples lifetimes. It might be a most amusing book. The question is how to do it. Vita should be Orlando, a young nobleman. There should be Lytton. & it should be truthful; but fantastic. Roger. Duncan. Clive. Adrian. Their lives should be related. But I can think of more books than I shall ever be able to write. How many little stories come into my head! (D3 156-57)

Though Woolf claims that she will sketch this new work “here,” in the diary, she does not in fact use the diary for significant discussion of Orlando. Woolf will abandon this larger

conception and eventually focus on Vita/Orlando, but it is interesting that she describes

104 the work as being a way of “writing the memoirs of one’s own times” while the people in question are still alive, but in a fantastic, outlandish way, as though this somehow gets more at the truth of people’s characters than straightforward biography. Hermione Lee notes, at the beginning of her own biography of Woolf, Woolf’s frustration with the conventions of ordinary, Victorian biography: “My God, how does one write a biography?” (qtd. in Lee 3). Lee notes,

Fiction is often her version of biography. Orlando makes an explicit game out of this relationship, and suggests to her the possibility of more such fictive biographies. Orlando’s biographer is written in as a character in pursuit of his/her subject, always self-consciously referring back to the conventions, which are not always adequate for the task in hand: “For that was the way his mind worked now, in violent see-saw from life to death, stopping at nothing in between, so that the biographer must not stop either, but must fly as fast as he can and so keep pace.” (Lee 8)

In a letter to Vita a month later, in October 1927, Woolf explains “how I could revolutionise biography in a night” (L3 429); it seems clear that she is talking about the revelation in the entry above, the idea that the truth of a real person might best be contained in fiction, rather than in the “draperies and decencies” of traditional biography

(qtd. in Lee 9). Lee notes two passages which highlight Woolf’s thoughts on the notions of biography espoused by her father’s generation, and by her father himself, in the pages of the Dictionary of National Biography. The first comes from a review of a biography of Christina Rossetti:

Here is the past an all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank; all we have to do is to look and to listen and to listen and to look and soon the little figures—for they are rather under life size—will begin to move and to speak, and as they move we shall arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant, for they thought when they were alive that they could go where they liked; and as they speak we shall read into their sayings all kinds of meanings which never struck them, for they believed when they were alive that they said straight off whatever came into their heads. But once you are in a biography all is different. (CE4 31, qtd. in Lee 8-9)

105

She laments the inability of traditional biography to get at the heart of the subject: “—But

that is where the biography comes to grief. The biographer cannot extract the atom. He

gives us the husk. Therefore as things are, the best method would be to separate the two

kinds of truth. Let the biographer print fully completely, accurately, the known facts

without comment; Then let him write the life as fiction” (qtd. in Lee 10). “The life as

fiction”: the phrase is key to Woolf’s understanding of her own process of what she

called “life-writing” and her own approach to Vita’s “biography” in Orlando. Lee notes

that Woolf constantly blurs the boundaries between biography and fiction in her own

diary; one could argue that every diarist does, for one records what one feels in a

particular mood, at a particular moment—one writes things that are not literally “true.”

Therefore, it seems a logical next step for Woolf to suggest that biography, which

purports to be the truth of a person’s whole life, might best be written as fiction, so that

one can get at the heart of the life. As will be seen, calling Orlando a “biography” would

cause some consternation and much confusion for booksellers.

On 5 October 1927, Woolf’s plan for her fictional biography is clearer: “And

instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year

1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about

from one sex to another. I think, for a treat, I shall let myself dash this in for a week,

while” (D3 161). The entry ends mid-sentence; the break occurs when the Woolfs leave

London for the country (presumably she did not take the diary with her), and she resumes her discussion of the new book on 22 October. Much has happened in the weeks since she wrote of it last:

106 “I shall let myself dash this in for a week”—I have done nothing, nothing, nothing else for a fortnight; & am launched somewhat furtively but with all the more passion upon Orlando: A Biography. It is to be a small book, & written by Christmas. I thought I could combine it with Fiction, but once the mind gets hot it cant stop; I walk making up phrases; sit, contriving scenes; am in short in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me; from which I have kept myself since last February, or earlier. Talk of planning a book, or waiting for an idea! This one came in a rush; I said to pacify myself, being bored & stale with criticism & faced with that intolerable dull Fiction, “You shall write a page of a story for a treat: you shall stop sharp at 11.30 & then go on with the Romantics”. I had very little idea what the story was to be about. But the relief of turning my mind that way about was such that I felt happier than for months; as if put in the sun, or laid on cushions; & after two days entirely gave up my time chart & abandoned myself to the pure delight of this farce: which I enjoy as much as I’ve ever enjoyed anything; & have written myself into half a headache & had to come to a halt, like a tired horse, & take a little sleeping draught last night: which made our breakfast fiery. I did not finish my egg. I am writing Orlando half in a mock style very clear & plain, so that people will understand every word. But the balance between truth & fantasy must be careful. It is based on Vita, Violet Trefusis, Lord Lascelles, Knole &c. (D3 161-62)

Her pleasure is obvious: she avoids working on her non-fiction in favor of Orlando, and

she makes plain that she intends for this book to be popular and accessible, despite the

oddities of its subject matter. “People will understand every word”: the implication being

that she is well aware that “people” did not “understand every word” of Jacob’s Room,

Mrs. Dalloway, or To the Lighthouse. While it is much too simplistic to suggest that

Orlando was written as Woolf’s bid to be a popular, best-selling novelist, this entry indicates that Woolf consciously wrote the novel in a simpler, more accessible style, one that “the masses” might take to more than the experimental prose of her previous work.

From this point, she writes quickly. By 20 November, she is already at Chapter

Three: “Do I learn anything? Too much of a joke perhaps for that; yet I like these plain sentences; & the externality of it for a change. It is too thin of course; splashed over the canvas; but I shall cover the ground by Jan. 7th (I say) & then re-write” (D3 164).

107 Already, she is beginning to worry that the work will be too frivolous to be taken seriously, but she continues writing. On 20 December she describes a scene in detail:

I am still writing the 3rd Chap. of Orlando. I have had of course to give up the fancy of finishing by February & printing this spring. It is drawing out longer than I meant. I have just been thinking over the scene when O. meets a girl (Nell) in the Park & goes with her to a neat room in Gerrard Street. There she will disclose herself. They will talk. This will lead to a diversion or two about women's love. This will bring in O.’s night life; & her clients (thats the word). Then she will see Dr Johnson, & perhaps write (I want somehow to quote it) To all you Ladies. So I shall get some effect of years passing; & then there will be a description of the lights of the 18th Century burning; & the clouds of the 19th Century rising. Then on to the 19th. But I have not considered this. I want to write it all over hastily, & so keep unity of tone. which in this book is very important. It has to be half laughing, half serious: with great splashes of exaggeration. (D3 167-68)

One gets the sense from these entries that Orlando is flying from Woolf’s pen, that she is scarcely able to keep up with the material. It is leading her; she is not leading it. Her sense of pleasure in the work is palpable: she is clearly enjoying herself, and finds the stylistic simplicity of the book a refreshing change from the experimental rigors of Mrs.

Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. There is no record of a scene giving her trouble, no mention of snags or hitches or even interruptions from other people. There is little to complain of in the writing process until the ending, which comes in February 1928:

For some reason, I am hacking rather listlessly at the last chapter of Orlando, which was to have been the best. Always always the last chapter slips out of my hands. One gets bored. One whips oneself up. I still hope for a fresh wind, & dont very much bother, except that I miss the fun, which was so tremendously lively all October, November & December. I have my doubts if it is not empty; & too fantastic to write at such length. (D3 175)

She writes that she is finished on 18 March 1928, “as the clock struck one” (D3 176).

She is typically doubtful of the book’s merit: “Yes its done—Orlando—begun on 8th

October, as a joke; & now rather too long for my liking. It may fall between stools, be too long for a joke, & too frivolous for a serious book” (D3 177). Despite finding the book

108 “a freak” (D3 180), a somewhat troubling term given its subject matter and the woman who inspired it, Woolf lets Leonard read it and sends it off to the printers on 31 May.

I have half forgotten Orlando already, since L. has read it & it has half passed out of my possession. I think it lacks the sort of hammering I should have given it if I had taken longer: is too freakish & unequal. Very brilliant now & then. As for the effect of the whole, that I cant judge. Not, I think ‘important’ among my works. L. says a satire. […] L. takes Orlando more seriously than I had expected. Thinks it in some ways better than The Lighthouse; about more interesting things, & with more attachment to life, & larger. The truth is I expect I began it as a joke, & went on with it seriously. Hence it lacks some unity. He says it is very original. Anyhow I’m glad to be quit this time of writing ‘a novel’; & hope never to be accused of it again. Now I want to write some very closely reasoned criticism; book on fiction; an essay of some sort (but not Tolstoy for the Times). (D3 184, 185)

Woolf’s typical dismissal of her just-finished novel seems even more, in this instance, a self-protective device. Given the novel’s content, its style, and its dedication (“To V.

Sackville-West”), Woolf may well have been concerned about how the book would be received, and what it might do to her reputation. She does not indicate, in any discussion of Orlando, that she feared being thought a lesbian for having written it, but the following year, upon the publication of A Room of One’s Own in 1929, she claimed that she would be “hinted at for a sapphist” (D3 262); it would be fair to assume that she might have felt such “hints” would appear in the criticism of Orlando.

She is tired of the book by June, and her mental state sounds rather alarming:

So sick of Orlando I can write nothing. I have corrected the proofs in a week; & cannot spin another phrase. I detest my own volubility. Why be always spouting words? Also I have almost lost the power of reading. Correcting proofs 5, 6, or 7 hours a day, writing in this & that meticulously, I have bruised my reading faculty severely. Take up Proust after dinner & put him down. This is the worst time of all. It makes me suicidal. Nothing seems left to do. All seems insipid & worthless. (D3 186)

109 The suicidal feelings seem to have been an exaggeration, for there is no real record of

Woolf having any particular bouts of mental illness during this period. On 22 September she reports an unexpected problem due to Orlando’s subtitle, “A Biography”:

But the news of Orlando is black. We may sell a third that we sold of The Lighthouse before publication—Not a shop will buy save in 6es & 12es. They say this is inevitable. No one wants biography. But it is a novel, says Miss Ritchie. But it is called a biography on the title page, they say. It will have to go to the Biography shelf. I doubt therefore that we shall do more than cover expenses—a high price to pay for the fun of calling it a biography. And I was so sure it was going to be the one popular book! Also it should be 10/6 or 12/6 not 9/- Lord, lord! (D3 198)

(Woolf admits here that Orlando was, in her mind, a bid for a “popular” book.) Her fears were unfounded, for the “sales [were] beyond our record for the first week” (D3 200).

The remaining entries in the diary discuss sales, the fact that the book is going into a third edition, has made £2000 (D3 201, 212, 232). And while she is fed up with Orlando by the time of its publication—not unlike the way one burns through a quick love affair, an apt metaphor for a book inspired by her wayward lover, Sackville-West—she is clear- headed enough about the book to be able to examine what the writing of it gave her.

And I cannot think what to ‘'write next’. I mean the situation is, this Orlando is of course a very quick brilliant book. Yes, but I did not try to explore. And must I always explore? Yes I think so still. Because my reaction is not the usual. Nor can I even after all these years run it off lightly. Orlando taught me how to write a direct sentence; taught me continuity & narrative, & how to keep the realities at bay. But I purposely avoided of course any other difficulty. I never got down to my depths & made shapes square up, as I did in The Lighthouse. Well but Orlando was the outcome of a perfectly definite, indeed overmastering impulse. I want fun. I want fantasy. I want (& this was serious) to give things their caricature value. And still this mood hangs about me. I want to write a history, say of Newnham or the womans movement, in the same vein. The vein is deep in me—at least sparkling, urgent. But is it not stimulated by applause? over stimulated? My notion is that there are offices to be discharged by talent for the relief of genius: meaning that one has the play side; the gift when it is mere gift, unapplied gift; & the gift when it is serious, going to business. And one relieves the other. (D3 202-03)

110 Still, despite the fun, “Orlando isn't a patch on Lighthouse” (D3 205), and is “childs play”

(D3 264). In typical form, she was already haunted by images for her next novel: moths

circling a flame, waves breaking on a shore, a fin passing far out in the water.

“An eyeless playpoem”: The Waves (1931)

On 15 September 1926, Woolf titles a section of her diary “A State of Mind,” and proceeds to delineate her mood at the time of finishing To the Lighthouse:

Woke up perhaps at 3. Oh its beginning its coming—the horror— physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart—tossing me up. I’m unhappy unhappy! Down—God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes; I detect that. Failure failure. (The wave rises). Oh they laughed at my taste in green paint! Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I’ve only a few years to live I hope. I cant face this horror any more—(this is the wave spreading out over me). This goes on; several times, with varieties of horror. Then, at the crisis, instead of the pain remaining intense, it becomes rather vague. I doze. I wake with a start. The wave again! The irrational pain: the sense of failure; generally some specific incident, as for example my taste in green paint, or buying a new dress, or asking Dadie for the week end, tacked on. At last I say, watching as dispassionately as I can, Now take a pull of yourself. No more of this. I reason. I take a census of happy people & unhappy. I brace myself to shove to throw to batter down. I begin to march blindly forward. I feel obstacles go down. I say it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. I become rigid & straight, & sleep again, & half wake & feel the wave beginning & watch the light whitening & wonder how, this time, breakfast & daylight will overcome it; & then hear L. in the passage & simulate, for myself as well as for him, great cheerfulness; & generally am cheerful, by the time breakfast is over. Does everyone go through this state? Why have I so little control? It is not creditable, nor lovable. It is the cause of much waste & pain in my life. (D3 110-11)

Mark Hussey posits this “mystical experience of depression” (351) as being the genesis

for The Waves (1931). The images of waves breaking repeatedly certainly lends itself to

such a reading, as does her later description of “the mystical side of this solitude,” where

she sees “a fin passing far out” in water (D3 113). Not long after, she notes the first

glimmerings of the novel in her discussion of “The Jessamy Brides” cited above, which

she predicts will be followed by “the very serious, mystical poetical work which I want to

111 come next” (D3 131). Thus, the seeds of The Waves may be found a good three-and-a- half years before the book appeared in print, and the entries that describe its genesis are primarily concerned with mood and tone, which is appropriate, given that The Waves could be considered a mood piece, or a tone poem. The writing of The Waves also illustrates Woolf’s use of the diary to its fullest potential.

The musical analogy seems fitting, given Woolf’s revelation on 18 June 1927:

[S]uddenly I rhapsodised (the night L. dined with the apostles) & told over the story of the Moths, which I think I will write very quickly, perhaps in between chapters of that long impending book on fiction. Now the moths will I think fill out the skeleton which I dashed in here: the play-poem idea: the idea of some continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but (The Waves) of the ship, the night &c, all flowing together: intersected by the arrival of the bright moths. A man & a woman are to be sitting at table talking. Or shall they remain silent? It is to be a love story: she is finally to let the last great moth in. The contrasts might be something of this sort: she might talk, or think, about the age of the earth: the death of humanity: then moths keep on coming. Perhaps the man could be left absolutely dim. France: near the sea; at night; a garden under the window. But it needs ripening. I do a little work on it in the evening when the gramophone is playing late Beethoven sonatas. (The windows fidget at their fastenings as if we were at sea.) (D3 139)

In the early stages of composition, bright moths arriving, as if to a flame, were to be the central image, rather than waves breaking on the shore. But even here, in the early stage of the planning, the book’s ultimate title makes an appearance, and the disembodied quality of the finished work is evident. What is different is the actual interaction between the man and the woman, their speech. In The Waves as published, the characters all speak in somewhat abstract soliloquies, and never directly address each other. This entry marks the first time that Woolf acknowledges listening to a particular composer—or any music of any kind—while writing a book. She would mention Beethoven again later, at a critical point in the writing.

112 Woolf seems in August 1927 to feel that The Moths is rather like milk that might

spoil: “I shall have the Moths full in my brain to pour out. I am keeping it standing a long

time, & rather fear that it may lose its freshness” (D3 150). The project disappears from

the diary entirely until a year later, on 12 August 1928, when she notes that “The Moths

hovers some where at the back of my brain” (D3 190), a lovely entomological image.

The lapse is understandable, given that in the interim she had completed and published

Orlando. As seen in the entry describing “The Jessamy Brides,” Orlando and The Waves

were imagined almost simultaneously, and The Waves clearly needed to be set aside as

Woolf wrote quickly through the former; the speed with which she wrote Orlando might therefore be explained as a combination of pleasure in the work and a desire to finish so that she might get to the challenge of The Waves. On the eve of the publication of

Orlando, Woolf asks herself, “And when, I wonder, shall I begin the Moths? Not until I am pressed into it by those insects themselves. Nor have I any notion what it is to be like—a completely new attempt I think. So I always think” (D3 198). On 7 November

1928, after discussing what she learned from writing Orlando, she posits the next book, and what it may offer her.

Yes, but The Moths? That was to be an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem. And there may be affectation in being too mystical, too abstract; saying Nessa & Roger & Duncan & Ethel Sands admire that: it is the uncompromising side of me; therefore I had better win their approval— Again, one reviewer days that I have come to a crisis in the matter of style: it is now so fluent & fluid that it runs through the mind like water. That disease began in The Lighthouse. The first part came fluid—how I wrote & wrote! Shall I now check & consolidate, more in the Dalloway Jacob’s Room style? I rather think the upshot will be books that relieve other books: a variety of styles & subjects: for after all, that is my temperament, I think: to be very little persuaded of the truth of anything—what I say, what people say—always to follow, blindly instinctively with a sense of leaping over a precipice—the call

113 of—the call of—now, if I write The Moths I must come to terms with these mystical feelings. (D3 203)

Woolf notes here the worry that will plague her throughout the writing of The Waves: that her style, so loose and so fluid, will “run through the mind like water,” leaving no mark on the brain of the reader. To some extent this was a concern with other books as well, particularly Mrs. Dalloway, when the stylistic innovations were newer, both for her and her readers—note the frequent worries about lightness, the lack of connection between

Septimus and Clarissa, etc. What is striking in this passage is her determination, despite the stylistic drawbacks, to make this novel even more obscure, more incorporeal, a

“mystical, eyeless playpoem,” something that might fall between the stools generically.

The entry looks physically unlike most others in the entire diary: she makes frequent paragraph breaks, suggesting that her thoughts are skipping wildly; she repeats phrases

(“the call of—the call of—”) as though she is fumbling for the right words; she drops punctuation even more frequently than usual, running words together. The passage feels rushed, breathless. Woolf is on the verge of a major breakthrough here, and the words seem frantic—she must get them down before they disappear.

She discusses the project at length on 28 November 1921, in a long and very revealing passage.

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. The Moths still haunts me, coming, as they always do, unbidden, between tea & dinner, while L. plays the gramophone. I shape a page or two; & make myself stop. Indeed I am up against some difficulties. Fame to begin with. Orlando has done very well. Now I could go on writing like that— the tug & suck are at me to do it. People say this was so spontaneous, so natural. And I would like to keep those qualities if I could without losing the others. But those qualities were largely the result of ignoring the others. They came of writing exteriorly; & if I dig, must I not lose them? And what is my own position towards the inner & the outer? I think a kind of ease & dash are good;—yes: I think even

114 externality is good; some combination of them ought to be possible. The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that dont belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit any thing to literature that is not poetry—by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novel[ist]s—that they select nothing? The poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in; yet to saturate. That is what I want to do in The Moths. It must include nonsense, fact, sordidity: but made transparent. (D3 209-10)

Here again Woolf notes the influence of music29 (Beethoven, perhaps, on the

gramophone?30), and here again notes her complaint with the realists, who, she claims,

have nothing to do with real life, the life as it is lived in the mind. The Waves would, to a

great degree, be Woolf’s most definitive modernist statement, in which she would

dispense with most semblances of plot—her other modernist novels, Jacob’s Room, Mrs.

Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts, despite their innovations, all have

fairly clear pots, recognizable characters, etc. The Waves would present a series of

floating voices (and the phrase “eyeless playpoem” is a remarkably apt description of a

work that limits the visual cues to the reader and focuses primarily on the voice), broken

by interludes of waves breaking, and it is here, in this entry, that Woolf announces that

the break with realism is imminent. This belief in the inadequacy of the standard

narrative to depict real life applies to her own life as well, and not just to her art:

29 Some critics have examined the possible influence of Beethoven on the composition of The Waves. See Gerald Levin’s “The Musical Style of The Waves” (Journal of Narrative Technique, 13, 3 [1983]: 164-71) and Mitchell A. Leaska’s The Novels of Virginia Woolf from Beginning to End (New York: John Jay P, 1977, 185n9) (Hussey 15).

30 It would be an activity not without interest to learn which records Leonard Woolf played that night. It is possible to do so: Leonard’s pocket diaries and card catalogs, in which he wrote down every gramophone record he owned and the date and frequency each was played, are housed in the library of the University of Sussex.

115 Now is life very solid, or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever: will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the world—this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change; one flying after another, so quick so quick, yet we are somehow successive, & continuous—we human beings; & show the light through. But what is the light? I am impressed by the transitoriness of human life to such an extent that I am often saying a farewell—after dining with Roger for instance; or reckoning how many more times I shall see Nessa. (D3 218)

She begins to see The Moths in geometric terms: “All the time I shall attack this angular shape in my mind. I think the Moths (if that is what I shall call it) will be very sharply cornered. I am not satisfied though with the frame. There is this sudden fertility which may be mere fluency. In old days books were so many sentences absolutely struck with an axe out of crystal: & now my mind is so impatient, so quick, in some ways so desperate” (D3 219). But by 28 May 1929 she still has not begun. “Now about this book, The Moths. How am I to begin it? And what is it to be? I feel no great impulse; no fever; only a great pressure of difficulty. Why write it then? Why write at all? Every morning I write a little sketch, to amuse myself” (D3 229). With no other novel does

Woolf question the way to begin as frequently as she does here. One assumes it was the newness of the method, such an advance on that of her previous work. But finally, on 23

June, she is ready to begin.

However, I now begin to see the Moths rather too clearly, or at least strenuously, for my comfort. I think it will begin like this: dawn; the shells on a beach; I dont know—voices of cock & nightingale; & then all the children at a long table—lessons. The beginning. Well, all sorts of characters are to be there. Then the person who is at the table can call out any one of them at any moment; & build up by that person the mood, tell a story; for instance about dogs or nurses; or some adventure of a childs kind; all to be very Arabian nights; & so on: this shall be Childhood; but it must not be my childhood; & boats on the pond; the sense of children; unreality; things oddly proportioned. Then another person or figure must be selected. The unreal world must be round all this—the phantom waves. The Moth must come in: the beautiful single moth. There must be a flower growing.

116 Could one not get the waves to be heard all through? Or the farmyard noises? Some odd irrelevant noises. She might have a book—one book to read in—another to write in—old letters. Early morning light—but this need not be insisted on; because there must be great freedom from ‘reality’. Yet everything must have relevance. Well all this is of course the ‘real’ life; & nothingness only comes in the absence of this. I have proved this quite certainly in the past half hour. Everything becomes green & vivified in me when I begin to think of the Moths. Also, I think, one is much better able to enter into other’s— (D3 236)

The entry breaks off; she later writes that she imagines she was interrupted, but she is not

sure. This is a pity, for in this entry, she utilizes the diary as never before. Her words

again suggest speed; she is drafting a rough sketch of the beginning of the novel in the

diary itself. And here the first image of the waves presents itself, which will become the

central metaphor and the title of the work. Critics have seized upon Woolf’s claim that

“this shall be Childhood; but it must not be my childhood” in numerous discussions of

the novel; one could argue again that the criticism of The Waves, and of all of Woolf’s

books, has benefited from the publication of the diary, for it offers so many avenues for

critical inquiry.

Woolf complains of being interrupted in her work by essay writing; this prevents

her from “step[ping] into that queer region”; “I shant stagnate anyhow” (D3 239, 240).

On 2 September 1929 she reveals that she can’t work because she is “talk-dried” and is

tired from articles: “This book would form in me could I let my mind lie asleep, clam like

a tideless sea; but all this time I’m breaking my mind up; destroying the growth

underneath” (D3 249)—note the way in which even the diary entries about the novel preserve the water imagery of the book and its title. On 4 September she considers putting the heading “The Lonely Mind” somewhere in The Moths, “as if it were a person”

(D3 251); nothing comes of this plan. It is not surprising, given the book’s final form,

117 that the initial pages come slowly: “[U]nderneath has been forming my Moths book. Yes, but it forms very slowly; & what I want is not to write it, but to think it for two or three weeks say—to get into the same current of thought & let that submerge everything, writing perhaps a few phrases here at my window in the morning” (D3 253). But she complains that every time she gets into this current of thought, she is “jerked out” of it

(D3 253). Clearly, The Waves is a work that requires deeper concentration and solitude than any other novel thus far, and it is no surprise that she turns to the diary as a portable

“room of her own” in which to allow the book to gestate. No other novel required such dark and private space in which to grow. The book’s then-central metaphor takes on new meaning for her: “Moths, I suddenly remember, dont fly by day. And there cant be a lighted candle. Altogether, the shape of the book wants considering—& with time I could do it” (D3 254).

The book, unwritten, becomes “a prodigious weight which I can’t lift yet” (D3

256). She tries to start again on 25 September 1929, but only succeeds in deciding that

The Moths won’t be the novel’s name (D3 257), a thought that first occurred to her when she remembered that moths don’t fly by day. She admits on 11 October that she is writing in the diary so as to avoid facing the novel:

And I snatch at the idea of writing here in order not to write Waves or Moths or whatever it is to be called. One thinks one has learnt to write quickly; & one hasn’t. And what is odd, I’m not writing with gusto or pleasure: because of the concentration. I am not reeling it off; but sticking it down. Also, never, in my life, did I attack such a vague yet elaborate design; whenever I make a mark I have to think of its relation to a dozen others. And though I could go on ahead easily enough, I am always stopping to consider the whole effect. In particular is there some radical fault in my scheme? I am not quite satisfied with this method of picking out things in the room & being reminded by them of other things. Yet I cant at the moment devise anything which keeps so close to the original design & admits of movement. (D3 259)

118 The joke, of course, of which she seems to be perfectly aware, is that in not writing the novel, she writes about the novel, and thus inches ahead. As has been noted elsewhere,

Woolf uses words like “looseness,” “casualness,” “slapdash,” and “haphazard,” among others, to describe the work in her diary. What seems clear is that Woolf has learned by

1929 that she can use the diary as a place for what writers like Peter Elbow in Writing

Without Teachers (1973) called “freewriting,” a technique whereby one writes down the loose stream of consciousness, and in which one can often discern the shape and the form of the work that is to come. Through this method, the writer can also trick him- or herself into writing the work in question, when he or she is otherwise particularly resistant to it.

It is arguable that it is not until The Waves that Woolf truly learns how to utilize her diary in this way. While she has used the diary to many useful ends from Jacob’s Room onward, it is only with The Waves that she begins to allow what goes on in the diary to feed the published work. The fragmentary entry on 23 June 1929 in which she writes of the children at the table with their lessons is a prime example of freewriting, where the material would later be directly utilized in a published work. No such writing, so directly related to a specific passage in a book, had appeared before.

“The Moths; but I think it is to be waves, is trudging along,” Woolf writes on 23

October 1929 (D3 262), and it seems that with the change in title, and with the establishment of a new central image and metaphor, the writing takes off. On 30

November 1929, she reports: “I fill in this page, nefariously; at the end of a morning’s work. I have begun the second part of Waves—I dont know, I dont know. I feel that I am only accumulating notes for a book—whether I shall ever face the labour of writing it,

God Knows. From some higher station I may be able to pull it together—at Rodmell, in

119 my new room” (D3 268).31 On Boxing Day, she is dissatisfied with the work and with her

progress.

All is rather rapt, simple, quick effective—except for my blundering on at The Waves. I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic’s dream. Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading; & pencil them into some sense. Still I am not satisfied. I think there is something lacking. I sacrifice nothing to seemliness. I press to my centre. I dont care if it all is scratched out. And there is something there. I incline now to try violent shots—at London—at talk—shouldering my way ruthlessly—& then, if nothing comes of it—anyhow I have examined the possibilities. But I wish I enjoyed it more. I dont have it in my head all day like The Lighthouse & Orlando. (D3 275)

The latter portion of the entry suggests that the stylistic pressures of the work make it

difficult for her to retain the whole, to hold the work in her mind the way she was able to

hold the perhaps simpler and more shapely structures of Orlando, To the Lighthouse, and,

she may have added, Mrs. Dalloway. Nevertheless, she continues to plunge ahead after

the new year:

Thanks to my pertinacity & industry, I can now hardly stop making up The Waves. The sense of this came acutely about a week ago on beginning to write the Phantom party: now I feel that I can rush on, after 6 months hacking, & finish: but without the least certainty how its to achieve any form. Much will have to be discarded: what is essential is to write fast & not break the mood—no holiday, no interval if possible, till it is done. Then rest. Then re-write. (D3 282)

She pessimistically predicts that the book, when finished, “wont sell more than 2,000

copies,” but then, nearly two years later, on 30 October 1931, she adds a parenthetical

aside to this entry to say, “It has sold about 6,500 today, Oct. 30th 1931—after 3 weeks.

But will stop now I suppose” (D3 285). (Though not frequently, Woolf does occasionally add such asides to the margins of her diary, and these, as well as other direct references, suggest that she reread the diary with some regularity.) She continues to worry about the

31 The “new room” Woolf refers to is the separate bedroom that was added to Monks House in 1929. One of the oddities of this room is that it could not (and still cannot) be accessed from inside the house: Woolf would need to step out into the garden in order to get to her bedroom.

120 looseness of the construction in February 1930: “(I keep on making up the Hampton

Court scene in The Waves —Lord how I wonder if I shall pull this book off! It is a litter of fragments so far)” (D3 287)—the latter an interesting image, calling to mind Eliot’s

“fragments” in The Waste Land. In March she is unable to keep working at the “difficult book” past noon (D3 296). On 9 April she discusses at length the issues of character so central to The Waves.

What I now think (about the Waves) is that I can give in a very few strokes the essentials of a person’s character. It should be done boldly, almost as caricature. I have yesterday entered what may be the last lap. Like every piece of the book it goes by fits & starts. I never get away with it; but am tugged back. I hope this makes for solidity; & must look to my sentences. The abandonment of Orlando & Lighthouse is much checked by the extreme difficulty of the form—as it was in Jacob’s Room. I think this is the furthest development so far; but of course it may miss fire somewhere. I think I have kept stoically to the original conception. What I fear is that the re-writing will have to be so drastic that I may entirely muddle it somehow. It is bound to be very imperfect. But I think it possible that I have got my statues against the sky. (D3 300)

As will be discussed in the next chapter, which deals with Woolf’s diary as a modernist text, Woolf here points to one of the essential features of her literary modernism: the delineation of character in a few broad strokes, not unlike the ways in which Vanessa

Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry were suggesting character in deliberately blank portraiture. One of Vanessa’s most famous portraits of Woolf, of Woolf seated in an orange chair with some knitting or mending in her lap, in which Woolf’s face is nearly featureless, still manages to suggest, according to many viewers who knew Woolf, her form and features better than any conventional portrait or photograph. Woolf’s desire for a few simple strokes mark her complete break from the David Copperfield notion of character construction, the A to Z linear movement from birth to death. While most readers of Woolf would argue that she achieved this goal earlier, in Mrs. Dalloway, To

121 the Lighthouse, and possibly even Jacob’s Room (in which Jacob’s empty pair of shoes

conveys his absence more painfully than any other single image), it appears here that

Woolf herself felt that she was only just then, when finishing The Waves, coming to her

full potential as a modernist delineator of character.

She completes the novel, provisionally, on 29 April 1930:

I have just finished, with this very nib-full of ink, the last sentence of The Waves. I think I should record this for my own information. Yes, it was the greatest stretch of mind I ever knew; certainly the last pages; I dont think they flop as much as usual. And I think I have kept starkly & ascetically to the plan. So much I will say in self-congratulation. But I have never written a book so full of holes & patches; that will need re-building, yes, not only re-modelling. I suspect the structure is wrong. Never mind. I might have done something easy & fluent; & this is a reach after that vision I had, the unhappy summer—or three weeks—at Rodmell, after finishing The Lighthouse. (D3 302)

She reflects a few days later on what she had had in mind.

The truth is, of course, I want to be back at The Waves. Yes that is the truth. Unlike all my other books in every way, it is unlike them in this, that I begin to re- write it, & conceive it again with ardour, directly I have done. I begin to see what I had in my mind; & want to begin cutting out masses of irrelevance, & clearing, sharpening & making the good phrases shine. One wave after another. No room. & so on. (D3 303)

The difference with this book is thus also apparent in her desire to be back at it, to plunge herself back into the process of revision, to continue in that mode and in that created world. Months later, she is in the process of revision, and feels that the book is finally achieving a shape, a form:

The Waves is I think resolving itself (I am at page 100) into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them running homogeneously in & out, in the rhythm of the waves. Can they be read consecutively? I know nothing about that. I think this is the greatest opportunity I have yet been able to give myself: therefore I suppose the most complete failure. Yet I respect myself for writing this book. Yes—even though it exhibits my congenital faults. (D3 312)

122 She mentions fleetingly in September 1931 that The Waves was written “to a rhythm not to a plot” (D3 316), a line of thinking that is not specifically addressed again in the diary with respect to this novel, but which recalls a description of the writing process she gave to Vita Sackville-West some years earlier, in 1926:

As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it: But no doubt I shall think differently next year. (L3 247)

It is not simply the shared metaphor of the wave forming in the mind that makes the passage seem so apt a description of the composition of The Waves. Woolf’s diary entries throughout the writing of the book reinforce the notion that she followed back- and-forth patterns of motion, isolated images and scenes, and that she attempted to put these down on paper as they occurred to her, even if they occurred as she was writing the diary. As will be discussed, this notion of writing to a rhythm rather than to a plot is essential to an understanding of Woolf’s modernism, and to examining her diary as yet another modernist text.

One of Woolf’s New Year’s resolutions in 1931 is “To make a good job of The

Waves” (D4 3); she is still unsure of the book’s merit. But on 7 February, she is able to write (and mean it) that the book is complete, and she reflects at length for the first time about the influence of her deceased brother Thoby on the final work:

Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised, the end of The Waves. I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity & intoxication that

123 I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad). I was almost afraid, remembering the voices that used to fly ahead. Anyhow it is done; & I have been sitting these 15 minutes in a state of glory, & calm, & some tears, thinking of Thoby & if I could write Julian Thoby Stephen 1881-1906 on the first page. I suppose not. How physical the sense of triumph & relief is! Whether good or bad, its done; & as I certainly felt at the end, not merely finished, but rounded off, completed, the thing stated—how hastily, how fragmentarily I know; but I mean that I have netted that fin in the waste of waters which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell when I was coming to an end of To the Lighthouse. What interests me in the last stage was the freedom & boldness with which my imagination picked up used & tossed aside all the images & symbols which I had prepared. I am sure that this is the right way of using them—not in set pieces, as I had tried at first, coherently, but simply as images; never making them work out; only suggest. Thus I hope to have kept the sound of the sea & the birds, dawn, & garden subconsciously present, doing their work under ground. (D4 10- 11)

Woolf is remarkably consistent in her images throughout her descriptions of the writing process of The Waves—here again, the image of the fin far out in the water appears, and this time, she nets it upon the book’s completion. The rounding-off of this image gives the diary a shapeliness, a form, and indicates that Woolf did, to some extent, think of her diary as a crafted text, one that has some consistency in its imagery and language. The entry also reinforces the “wave in the mind” idea, in that Woolf describes being led by her own voice, following it where it goes—following the rhythm of the words, rather than the sense. And she seems comfortable, for once, with the notion of setting images and scenes side by side and suggesting, rather than insisting, upon a connection.

Leonard Woolf’s verdict is recorded on 19 July:

“It is a masterpiece” said L. coming out to my lodge this morning. “And the best of your books”. This note I make; adding that he also thinks the first 100 pages extremely difficult, & is doubtful how far any common reader will follow. But Lord! what a relief! I stumped off in the rain to make a little round to Rat Farm in jubilation […]. (D4 36)

124 The remaining entries on The Waves cover the book’s critical reception and sales: the sales, as noted above, were better than Woolf expected, and the critics, while generally praising the book, were often bewildered by the style, and had trouble distinguishing the bodiless characters from one another (Hussey 355-56). Woolf’s recounting of the writing of The Waves in her diary represents the fullest use of this work as an aid to her professional writing. It is the book most frequently discussed to that date, and it is the book that begins to take its final shape in the diary’s pages. This period of writing, from

1928 to 1931, represents the diary being used to its fullest potential. Woolf would need the solace of the diary as she worked through her next major piece of fiction, but, inexplicably, she rarely used it.

“Here & Now”: The Years (1937)

Virginia Woolf first conceived the idea of a multigenerational family saga in

1915, when the novel that was to become Night and Day and was originally entitled “The

Third Generation” (D1 19) was to deal with three generations of a prosperous London family. She abandoned this idea fairly quickly, and chose in Night and Day to focus on the current generation and the one immediately preceding it, with the oldest generation

(the first?) hovering over the book in the form of Richard Alardyce, the famous Victorian poet who casts so large a shadow over the achievements of his descendants. Woolf would not forget this original impulse, and would, to some extent, return to it years later with the book which would begin life as The Pargiters and be published as The Years

(1937). Woolf had certainly read D. H. Lawrence’s multigenerational works The

Rainbow and Women in Love (the latter of which would cause Lady Ottoline Morrell such pain, with its cruel caricature of her as Hermione Roddice), and Hermione Lee notes

125 that Woolf, while wary of Lawrence as a person, would always be interested in his work

(345). It is possible that another suggestive influence on The Years may have been John

Galsworthy’s multi-volume The Forsyte Saga, another depiction of several generations of a prosperous English family. Like The Waves, The Years is thoroughly documented in the diary (indeed, in terms of sheer number of references, it is probably the most discussed of all of Woolf’s fiction), but unlike the writing about The Waves, which is exploratory and tentative and a clear aid to the work, the diary entries on The Years are a record of pain and frustration and thwarted ambition. Michael Cunningham suggests that

Between the Acts, Woolf’s final novel, is the book “which helped to kill her” (xlii); a reading of the diary suggests that that dubious honor might more accurately belong to The

Years.

She began the novel, as usual, full of enthusiasm and energy. The book makes its first appearance in the diary on 23 January 1931: “One goes on making up The Open

Door, or whatever it is to be called. The didactive demonstrative style conflicts with the dramatic” (D4 6). The novel is already being called “didactic,” a trait which will eventually be contrasted with the poetry of The Waves. Woolf notes many times that she followed the style of To the Lighthouse with the stylistically more conventional Orlando; she followed Orlando with the poetic rigors of The Waves. It seems clear that Woolf here senses the swing of the pendulum back to a more conventional novel, and the form she chooses—the family saga—certainly lends itself to that mode. But after the beauty of

The Waves, such a swing back would almost surely be a letdown (and, as will be seen,

Leonard Woolf’s reaction to the book confirms this). “The Open Door” is not mentioned again until November 1932, when it has metamorphosed into “The Pargiters […], the

126 essay-novel” (D4 129).32 By 10 November, she is writing the book, and describes a scene based on an incident in her childhood: “I am taking a morning off, having done the child scene—the man exposing himself—in the Pargiters” (D4 130)—there are several reports

of a man who would lurk around Hyde Park Gate when Woolf was young and expose

himself to girls in the street (Lee 39). With little fanfare, Woolf announces on 4

December that she is finishing “1880” (the first part of the book), and is preparing for the

second (D4 131). In succeeding days she talks of having her head full of the book, of slowly making up scenes (D4 143, 144).

During this period, she was also writing Flush, her comic biography of Elizabeth

Barrett Browning’s spaniel, partly as a relief from her other work; Flush would appear in

1933. On 21 January 1933, she writes of her progress with The Pargiters:

So I am battening down my Pargiters say till Wednesday—it shant be later, I swear. And now I grow doubtful of the value of those figures. I’m afraid of the didactic; perhaps it was only that spurious passion that made me rattle away before Christmas. Anyhow I enjoyed it immensely, & shall again--oh to be free, in fiction, making up my scenes again—however discreetly. (D4 144-45)

And five days later:

Well, Flush is, I swear, despatched. Nobody can say I dont take trouble with my little stories. And now, having bent my mind for 5 weeks sternly this way, I must unbend them the other—the Pargiter way. No critic ever gives full weight to the desire of the mind for change. Talk of being many sided--naturally one must go the other way. Now if I ever had the wits to go into the Shakespeare business I believe one would find the same law there—tragedy comedy, & so on. Looming behind the P.s I can just see the shape of pure poetry beckoning me. But the P.s is a delightful solid possession to be enjoyed tomorrow. How bad I shall find it. (D4 145)

The odd shape of the novel as originally conceived—of chapters describing the life of the

Pargiter family (in particular its women) interlaced with non-fiction essays about the

32 The name “Pargiter” had been in Woolf’s mind for many years; it in fact appears in the diary in 1917 and 1919—while Woolf refers to the “signalman” at Southease and Rodmell halt, Anne Olivier Bell reveals that his name was Tom Pargiter (D1 39n).

127 position of women during the relevant decades33—is first mentioned on 2 February 1933:

“I am going however to work largely, spaciously, fruitfully on that book. Today I finished—rather more completely than usual—revising the first chapter. I’m leaving out the interchapters—compacting them in the text; & project an appendix of dates. A good idea?” (D4 146). (She follows this sentence with a note that Galsworthy has just died, and it is fitting that she is beginning work on a very Galsworthian work.) She works with steady progress through the spring, and then describes for herself how she envisions the work in progress:

But The Pargiters. I think this will be a terrific affair. I must be bold & adventurous. I want to give the whole of the present society—nothing less: facts, as well as the vision. And to combine them both. I mean, The Waves going on simultaneously with Night & Day. Is this possible? At present I have assembled 50,000 words of ‘real’ life: now in the next 50 I must somehow comment; Lord knows how—while keeping the march of events. The figure of Elvira is the difficulty. She may become too dominant. She is to be seen only in relation to other things. This should give I think a great edge to both of the realities—this contrast. At present, I think the run of events is too fluid & too free. It reads thin; but lively. How am I to get the depth without becoming static? But I like these problems, & anyhow theres a wind & a vigour in this naturalness. It should aim at immense breadth & immense intensity. It should include satire, comedy, poetry, narrative, & what form is to hold them all together? Should I bring in a play, letters, poems? I think I begin to grasp the whole. And its to end with the press of daily normal life continuing. And there are to be millions of ideas but no preaching—history, politics, feminism, art, literature—in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like, admire hate & so on. (D4 152)

Woolf’s suggestion, that she take the formal innovations of The Waves and yoke them to the traditional narrative of Night and Day is a fascinating concept, but one that, in hindsight, seems ultimately doomed to failure. One could not choose two more disparate works from Woolf’s canon, and to attempt to make the novels fit together into some kind of new form sounds nearly impossible. Already, she feels that the new work is too

33 A full description of Woolf’s intentions for The Pargiters is beyond the scope of this chapter. For a detailed explanation of Woolf’s plans, see Mitchell A. Leaska’s introduction to his edition The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years (New York: Harcourt 1977).

128 thin—this could be a result of trying to suggest character with a few brushstrokes in a

traditional format, though this is guesswork, since we don’t know precisely which section

of the book Woolf refers to in this entry. While the work proceeded steadily enough

through 1933, she was, without knowing it, embarking on a book that would become her

longest in the writing, second only to The Voyage Out. Quentin Bell summarizes the early stage of the writing, based on his reading of the diary, quite succinctly:

The history of the writing of The Years was something like this: it began very joyously in the autumn of 1932 and proceeded without a check until June of the following year (1933). Then Virginia’s efforts became more spasmodic. She was “in flood” in June, and again in July; there were difficulties in August and a rearrangement of all the first part. “I have stopped inventing the Pargiters,” she writes on 20 August; then she began to rewrite but there was not a word done in October, and on 29 October she declares, “No, my head is too tired.” But Part 4 was finished in December and 1934 began with another burst of creative energy; she was at work on the air-raid scene in February, in March she was checked again: Nelly’s dismissal hung over her and there were decorators in the house; and then in May, despite influenza on her return from Ireland, she started Part 7 and things went fairly well; in June she lost momentum and regained it; in July “that particular vein” was worked out, and she rested, priming herself for a further effort, getting “a little fresh water” in her well. By August she believed that she could at last see the end of it and, at the time of Roger’s death, she was working on the last chapter with some excitement and enthusiasm; the last words of the first draft were written on 30 September 1934. (QB2 191-92)

The death of Roger Fry in 1934 and the request of his longtime companion Helen Anrep

for Woolf to write his biography was an unexpected interruption, and while Woolf would

later come to hate the grinding work on Roger Fry: A Biography (1940), the research for

it would provide some distraction from the increasing tedium of writing The Years.

Woolf was deeply affected by Fry’s death:

Roger died on Sunday. I was walking with Clive on the terrace when Nessa came out. We sat on the seat there for a time. On Monday we went up with Nessa. He came. Nessa saw Helen [Anrep]. Tomorrow we go up, following some instinct, to the funeral. I feel dazed: very wooden. Women cry, L. says: but I dont know why I cry—mostly with Nessa. And I’m too stupid to write anything. My head all stiff. I think the poverty of life now is what comes to me. a thin blackish

129 veil over everything. Hot weather. A wind blowing. The substance gone out of everything. I dont think this is exaggerated. It’ll come back I suppose. Indeed I feel a great wish, now & then, to live more all over the place, to see people, to create, only for the time one cant make the effort. (D4 242)

In the period before Fry’s death, Woolf had been plodding along at Here and Now (the novel’s new title as of 2 September 1933) (D4 176). She found the novel “more real” than the Jubilee for the Women’s Co-operative Guild on 20 June 1933 (D4 165), an interesting remark, given the novel’s nascent feminism, which would shortly split off from the novel proper, when the essay portions of the manuscript would become the seeds for a separate book altogether, Three Guineas (1938). Through 1933, her images used to describe the writing of the novel are fluid, running. But by early 1934, she “cant get into flood” (D4 205) on the book any longer, and finds distractions (such as issues with her troublesome servant, Nelly Boxhall, referred to earlier) to spoil entire days of work. Through the spring she plots out the last few chapters, and makes fairly steady progress, completing the last chapter around the time of Fry’s death. In October 1934, she suffers a setback, when Wyndham Lewis, the artist and writer so famously hostile to the Bloomsbury Group after a conflict with Roger Fry at the Omega Workshops,34

published Men Without Art, in which he called “Mrs. Woolf” a novelist whose

importance “may be exaggerated by her friends” (D4 251n). Though Woolf claims that

the “W. L. illness” only lasted two days (D4 253), the criticism, coupled with Fry’s death,

depressed her and slowed her down.

By 2 December 1934 she thinks it “a good book today” (D4 264), and in February

1935 she writes:

34 For a detailed (and very funny) account of Wyndham Lewis’s quarrel with Bloomsbury, see the section on “The Ideal Home Rumpus” in S. P. Rosenbaum’s The Bloomsbury Group (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1977), pages 331-361.

130 And I have been writing & writing & re-writing the scene by the Round Pond. What I want to do is to reduce it all so that each sentence though perfectly natural dialogue has a great pressure of meaning behind it. And the most careful harmony & contrast of scene—the boats colliding &c—has also to be arranged. Hence the extreme difficulty. But I hope perhaps tomorrow to have done, & then the dinner party & Kitty in the country should go quicker. At least I find the upper air scenes much simpler: & I think its right to keep them so. But Lord what a lot of work still to do! It wont be done before August. And here I am plagued by the sudden wish to write an Anti fascist Pamphlet. L. & I, after snarling over my cigarette smoking last night (I’m refraining altogether & without difficulty today) had a long discussion about all the things I might put in my pamphlet. He was extremely reasonable & adorable, & told me I should have to take account of the economic question. His specialised knowledge is of course an immense gain, if I could use it & stand away: I mean in all writing, its the person’s own edge that counts. (D4 282)

This last is a new note. With the news from Europe worsening, Woolf began to correspond with anti-war and anti-fascist activists, and the prospect of a new war

(predicted so long before by Woolf’s friend, the economist John Maynard Keynes, in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace) depressed her utterly, and she would eventually begin to feel that fiction-writing was futile in wartime. In March, she writes:

The only thing worth doing in this book is to stick it out: stick to the idea, & dont lower it an inch, in deference to anyone. […] [W]ell, this is the only answer: to stick to my ideas. And I wish I need never read about myself, or think about myself, anyhow till its done, but look firmly at my object & think only of expressing it. Oh what a grind it is embodying all these ideas, & having perpetually to expose my mind, opened & intensified as it is by the heat of creation to the blasts of the outer world. If I didn’t feel so much, how easy it would be to go on— (D4 289)

She sounds as though she’s lecturing herself to keep her head down and to pay attention to her work, and not to be distracted by childish things: she is not to read about herself, or think about herself, but is to focus on the task at hand. This is a far cry from the freedom and bliss of Orlando, or the occasionally ecstatic rigors of The Waves.

Later that month: “I wrote the whole of that d—d chapter again, in a spasm of desperation & I think got it right, by breaking up, the use of thought skipping, &

131 parentheses. Anyhow thats the hang of it. And I cut from 20 to 30 pages” (D4 290). The

language, again, is not pleasant: the writing is a “spasm,” the chapter is “d—d.” Over the

summer, it seems clear that Woolf was suffering from some form of the usual mental

illness that had plagued her since her teens. On 5 June she writes:

Back here again, & the grim wooden feeling that has made me think myself dead since we came back is softening slightly. Its beginning this cursed dry hard empty chapter again in part. Every time I say it will be the devil! but I never believe it. And then the usual depressions come. And I wish for death. But I am now seeing that the last 200 pages will assert themselves, & force me to write a play more or less: all broken up: & I stop to begin making up. Also, after the queer interlude, at once life—that is the telephone beginning—starts. So that one is forcibly chafed. (D4 319)

Woolf’s mental states, and the ways in which she does and does not address them in her diary, will be discussed in a later chapter. Her diary at this point records her attempts to work on revisions of The Years despite severe headaches and thoughts of death. Quentin

Bell claims that she “finished what she called a ‘wild retyping’ on 15 July, and in August

at Rodmell was making a further typed version at the rate of 100 pages a week and

clearly felt a resurgence of energy” (QB2 193). But the entries for the remaining months

of 1935 are a litany of complaints of headaches, fatigue, depression, and frustration with

her work. She finally calls the novel, somewhat appropriately, The Years in September

1935, and writes:

Absolutely floored. Sally in bed. Cant pump up a word. Yet I can see, just, that somethings there; so I shall wait, a day or two, & let the well fill. It has to be damned deep this time—740 pages in it. I think, psychologically, this is the oddest of my adventures. Half my brain dries completely; but I’ve only to turn over, & there’s the other half, I think, ready, quite happily to write a little article. Oh if only anyone knew anything about the brain. And, even today, when I’m desperate, almost in tears looking at the chapter, unable to add to it, I feel I’ve only got to fumble & find the end of the ball of string--some start off place, someone to look at Sara perhaps—no, I dont know—& my head would fill & the tiredness go. But I’ve been waking & worrying. (D4 338)

132 The work is wearing her to a frazzle, and the final revisions are mercifully complete by

December 1935, and she claims in March 1936 that she is retreating to the diary to avoid

looking at the book again:

I ought not to be doing this: but I cannot go on bothering with those excruciating pages any more. I shall come in at 3 & do some; & again after tea. For my own guidance: I have never suffered, since The Voyage Out, such acute despair on re-reading, as this time. On Saturday for instance: there I was, faced with complete failure: & yet the book is being printed. Then I set to: in despair: thought of throwing it away; but went on typing. After an hour, the line began to taughten. Yesterday I read it again; & I think it may be my best book. However. . . I’m only at the Kings death. I think the change of scene is whats so exhausting: the catching people plumb in the middle: then jerking off. Every beginning seems lifeless--& then I have to retype. I’ve more or less done 250: & theres 700 to do. A walk down the river & through Richmond Park did more than anything to pump blood in. (D5 17)

For much of the spring, Woolf was ill. And even though returning to health also means returning to The Years, she is grateful for it:

I can only, after 2 months, make this brief note, to say at last after 2 months dismal & worse, almost catastrophic illness—never been so near the precipice to my own feeling since 1913—I’m again on top. I have to re-write, I mean interpolate & rub out most of The Years in proof. But I cant go into that. Can only do an hour or so. Oh but the divine joy of being mistress of my mind again! (D5 24)

Mark Hussey notes that Woolf “made the unprecedented step of having galleys prepared before showing the new work to Leonard” (388). One assumes that this was because she was afraid of the work’s merit and thus wanted the book ready for publication even if

Leonard disliked it—the famously thrifty Leonard might not have wanted to waste the time and energy and expense of the galleys without publishing the book. Woolf writes:

On Sunday I started to read the proofs. When I had read to the end of the first section I was in despair: stony but convinced despair. I made myself yesterday read on to Present Time. When I reached that landmark I said This is happily so bad that there can be no question about it. I must carry the proofs, like a dead cat, to L. & tell him to burn them unread. This I did. And a weight fell off my shoulders. That is true. I felt relieved of some great pack. (D5 29)

133

She nervously awaits Leonard’s response, and over the next few days, his comments are recorded in the diary.

The miracle is accomplished. L. put down the last sheet about 12 last night; & could not speak. He was in tears. He says it is “a most remarkable book—he likes it better than The Waves.” & has not a spark of doubt that it must be published. I, as a witness, not only to his emotion, but to his absorption, for he read on & on, can’t doubt his opinion: what about my own? Anyhow the moment of relief was divine. I hardly know yet if I’m on my heels or head—so amazing is the reversal since Tuesday morning. (D5 30)

Years later, Leonard Woolf would reveal in his autobiography that he did not find The

Years a particularly satisfactory book, but that he knew better than to tell her the truth:

[W]e decided that I should read the proofs of The Years and that she would accept my verdict of its merits and defects and whether it should or should not be published. It was for me a difficult and dangerous task. I knew that unless I could give a completely favourable verdict she would be in despair and would have a very serious breakdown. On the other hand, I had always read her books immediately after she had written the last word and always given an absolutely honest opinion. The verdict on The Years which I now gave her was not absolutely and completely what I thought about it. As I read it I was greatly relieved. It was obviously not in any way as bad as she thought it to be; it was in many ways a remarkable book and many authors and most publishers would have been glad to publish it as it stood. It thought it a good deal too long, particularly in the middle, and not really as good as The Waves, To the Lighthouse, and Mrs. Dalloway. To Virginia I praised the book more than I should have done if she had been well, but I told her exactly what I thought about its length. This gave her enormous relief and, for the moment, exhilaration, and she began to revise the proofs in order to send them back to the printer. (Downhill 155)

What is most ironic about the publication of The Years in 1937 is the fact that for all the turmoil surrounding its composition, it was an enormous success. In the United

States it was a best-seller, which helped to land Woolf on the cover of Time magazine, in a photograph by Man Ray. It was even published in a United States Armed Services edition, in a horizontal, rectangular paperback format, perfect for slipping into a

134 regulation knapsack. With some of the proceeds of this novel’s success, Woolf bought

the fur coat in which she would drown herself four years later.

Apart from the fact that while The Years is an enjoyable novel, it remains a

regression from the brilliance of The Waves. What is perhaps saddest about its tortuous

composition is that Woolf’s diary provided no aid, no respite, no relief. The Waves showed the diary at its fullest peak of potential, while the entries surrounding The Years

are a litany of complaints and feelings of depression and failure. It is as though Woolf

forgot all that she’d learned in using the diary on her previous book. The diary’s record

of Woolf’s next book, her last, would be a more straightforward account of a process

with much forward momentum, but it too, ultimately, would become a record of despair.

“Summers night: a complete whole”: Between the Acts (1941)

Mark Hussey suggests that a number of factors influenced the composition of

Between the Acts (1941), originally entitled Pointz Hall. By 1940, the Woolfs were

living almost entirely at Rodmell, the Blitz having begun and their house at

Mecklenburgh Square having been destroyed by a bomb. Hussey notes that Woolf “was

acutely aware that a way of life she had known and cherished was in imminent danger of

disappearing” (27). Living in the country full time was never a satisfactory situation for

her, and she was forced to think about the village in which she lived, its traditions, its

culture, its customs. She was conscious of the fact that English civilization (and

civilization in general) was conceivably on the verge of being wiped out; war had been

brought close to home when her nephew Julian Bell was killed while driving an

ambulance in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. This, coupled with the work she had done

in researching Three Guineas, had a profound impact on the tone of her last novel.

135 This new book first appears as an idea as early as April 1938: “Last night I began

making up again: Summers night: a complete whole: that’s my idea” (D5 133). This is clearly the origin of a piece that would later be published as “The Moment: Summer’s

Night,” in which people sit in a dark garden and are “passive participants in a pageant”

(CE2 293), which points to the pageant in Between the Acts; the first line of the novel as published is “It was a summer’s night and they were talking, in the big room with the windows open to the garden, about the cesspool” (3). A few days later, Woolf sketches out her idea in greater depth, in a passage reminiscent of those used to describe the fleshing out of The Waves:

[H]ere am I sketching out a new book; only dont please impose that huge burden on me again, I implore. Let it be random & tentative; something I can blow of a morning, to relieve myself of Roger: dont, I implore, lay down a scheme; call in all the cosmic immensities; & force my tired & diffident brain to embrace another whole—all parts contributing—not yet awhile. But to amuse myself, let me note: why not Poyntzet Hall: a centre: all lit. discussed in connection with real little incongruous living humour; & anything that comes into my head; but “I” rejected: ‘We’ substituted: to whom at the end there shall be an invocation? “We” . . . composed of many different things . . . we all life, all art, all waifs & strays—a rambling capricious but somehow unified whole—the present state of my mind? And English country; & a scenic old house—& a terrace where nursemaids walk? & people passing—& a perpetual variety & change from intensity to prose. & facts—& notes; &—but eno’. (D5 135)

On 29 April 1938, she is so absorbed by thoughts of this new project that she is unable to turn her attention to Roger Fry: A Biography (D5 137); she briefly considers on 9 May writing Pointz Hall as a play (D5 139), later deciding upon the pageant within the novel.

Throughout the spring she contrasts “living in the solid world of Roger” with the “airy world of Pointz Hall” (D5 141), a fairly remarkable contrast, given that Woolf, in the past, had traditionally never seen her non-fiction and fiction as being mutually exclusive; indeed, she attempted to combine the two in The Pargiters. While this back and forth

136 movement between solidity and lightness seems agreeable to her at the moment, she immediately launches into a discussion of her fears, and includes her famous description of “the pack”:

What I’m afraid of is the taunt Charm & emptiness. The book I wrote with such violent feelings to relieve that immense pressure will not dimple the surface. That is my fear. Also I’m uneasy at taking this role in the public eye—afraid of autobiography in public. But the fears are entirely outbalanced (this is honest) by the immense relief & peace I have gained, & enjoy this moment. Now I am quit of that poison & excitement. Nor is that all. For having spat it out, my mind is made up. I need never recur or repeat. I am an outsider. I can take my way: experiment with my own imagination in my own way. The pack may howl, but it shall never catch me. And even if the pack—reviewers, friends, enemies—pays me no attention or sneers, still I’m free. (D5 141)

While much of this entry sounds almost optimistic—and the ending note is certainly so— there is a frantic quality to the passage that makes the reader wonder about her mental state. Having seen enough of the bravado and boldness with which Woolf started most of her work, the reader of this passage cannot but wonder if it will hold, this time. She also sounds here the desire for anonymity, which is a crucial aspect of her fifties, a period in which she shunned the spotlight and became increasingly withdrawn from the public eye, just at the point when her fame was at its height.

By June 1938 she is “writing gaily” (D5 149); she hits a “difficult passage” on 5

July (D5 154). On 7 July she complains of getting to work on Roger Fry after the

“violent oscillations” of “3 Gs [Three Guineas] & P. H.” (D5 155). The concept of the play within the book is in place by August (D5 159), and she claims to be enjoying the work, though she adds, “Thats something, for it wont please anyone, if anyone should ever read it” (D5 160). After a few delays due to work on Roger Fry, she is again

“kicking my heels” on 16 September (D5 171). The work continues to be absorbing and enjoyable (D5 172, 179). She reports on a plan to write, in the evenings, “little poems” to

137 be inserted into Pointz Hall (D5 180). By the end of the year she has written 120 pages of what she envisions will be a 220-page book (D5 193). What is striking about the entries for the bulk of 1938 is that while she records a steady stream of progress and continued interest—a refreshing change from the account of The Years—she is nevertheless not using the diary in the same full manner as she did with The Waves. The

entries for Pointz Hall / Between the Acts are more akin to those for Jacob’s Room, Mrs.

Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, etc.: accounts of progress, but little in the way of utilizing

the diary as a way to work out technical problems.

In January 1939, she is in “full flood” on Pointz Hall (D5 200). She writes in

February of “one day’s happiness” of working on the book (D5 205). She manages to keep writing even though “Miss [Ivy] Compton Burnett is praised” in the TLS and the

New Statesman and Nation (D5 207 & n). After T. S. Eliot sends her his play Family

Reunion, she begins to wonder about her own skill at writing the pageant within her novel

(D5 210)—the old rivalry is still in place. She breaks for several months, and then returns to work, noting that she has written a speech for Flavinda, a character in “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” in Pointz Hall (D5 228 & n).

Entries are very sporadic through the first months of 1940, but pick up again in

May, when she comments on “Scraps, orts & fragments, as I said in PH. which is now bubbling—I’m playing with words; & think I owe some dexterity to finger exercises here” (D5 290). This passage is key, for it reveals that once again, while Woolf may not talk about a specific book she is writing, these “finger exercises” allow her to become loose and limber for when she sits down to more formal work. She works quickly from this point, saying on 22 June 1940, “I feel oughtn’t I to finish off P.H.: oughtn’t I to finish

138 something by way of an end? The end gives its vividness, even its gaiety & recklessness to the random daily life” (D5 298). For all the talk of wishing to finish through the summer, she suggests “first a C. R. [another installment in her Common Reader series of collected essays]: then PH” (D5 305). Through the summer of 1940, the diary is filled with news of the war, and accounts of planes flying low overhead. Nevertheless, she keeps working on Pointz Hall, wondering in August if the book qualifies as poetry (D5

313). In September she is pleased with her progress, but by November she is writing “in spurts” (D5 336). On 17 November, she notes:

I observe, as a curious trifle in mental history—I shd like to take naturalists notes—human naturalists notes—that it is the rhythm of a book that, by running in the head, winds one into a ball: & so jades one. The rhythm of PH. (the last chapter) became so obsessive that I heard it, perhaps used it, in every sentence I spoke. By reading the notes for memoirs I broke this up. The rhythm of the notes is far freer & looser. Two days of writing in that rhythm has completely refreshed me. So I go back to PH tomorrow. This I think is rather profound. (D5 339)

By 23 November, the book is finished.

Having this moment finished The Pageant—or Poyntz Hall?—(begun perhaps April 1938) my thoughts turn, well up, to write the first chapter of the next book (nameless). Anon, it will be called. The exact narrative of this last morning should refer to Louie’s interruption, holding a glass jar, in whose thin milk was a pat of butter. Then I went in with her to skim the milk off: then I took the pat & showed it to Leonard. This was a moment of great household triumph. I am a little triumphant about the book. I think its an interesting attempt in a new method. I think its more quintessential than the others. More milk skimmed off. A richer pat, certainly a fresher than that misery The Years. I’ve enjoyed writing almost every page. This book was only (I must note) written at intervals when the pressure was at its highest, during the drudgery of Roger. I think I shall make this then my scheme: if the new book can be made to serve as daily drudgery—only I hope to lessen that—anyhow it will be a supported on fact book—then I shall brew some moments of high pressure. I think of taking my mountain top—that persistent vision—as a starting point. Then see what comes. If nothing, it wont matter. (D5 340-41)

139 Woolf records in January 1941 that she has lost several pages of the manuscript

(D5 354), and on 26 February makes her last recorded comment on the novel, in which

she gives it its final title: “Finished Pointz Hall, the Pageant: the Play—finally Between

the Acts this morning” (D5 356). Quentin Bell notes that Woolf was ill through much of

the beginning of 1941, and that the completion of a book was always a difficult time for

her psychologically (QB2 224). On 27 March, Woolf wrote to John Lehmann, Leonard

Woolf’s partner in the Hogarth Press, to say that Between the Acts was “too silly and trivial” to publish (L6 486). The following day, she drowned herself in the River Ouse.

Her body was not found for three weeks.

140 Chapter Three: “Stay this moment” The Diary of Virginia Woolf as a Modernist Text

One could certainly argue that all fiction is about time, the “and then, and then,

and then” of the plot. But the fiction of Virginia Woolf seems particularly preoccupied

with time: how it moves, how it feels as it’s moving, how it is perceived differently by

different characters. Mrs. Dalloway hearing the “leaden circles dissolv[ing] in the air” as

Big Ben chimes the hours; James Ramsay unable to contain his excitement at the

prospect of going to the lighthouse tomorrow and feeling the inevitable drag of time

when one wants to hasten a pleasant event; the swift passage of time during the war and

the havoc it wreaks on the Ramsays and their seaside house; Orlando changing sex and

observing the pageant of English history from the Elizabethan era to Thursday, the

eleventh of October, 1928; the rising and setting of the sun over the waves; the Pargiters

passing through the years, generation after generation; the weighted pause in the interval

between the acts of a British village country pageant depicting the swath of English

history—nearly every piece of Woolf’s fiction is inscribed around the theme of time.

Julia Briggs notes that “[e]ven the titles of her books suggest her sense of its passage—

Night and Day, Monday or Tuesday, The Hours [the working title of Mrs. Dalloway], The

Waves, The Years, Between the Acts” (Reading 125). Woolf repeatedly contrasts “clock

time” with “personal time,” most obviously in Mrs. Dalloway, where the characters go

about their day in London, Big Ben signaling the passing hours, while existing at the

same time in a head space that is entirely personal, completely fluid, and boundless in its

ability to transcend liner time. Several of her novels—Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and

Between the Acts—are, like Joyce’s Ulysses, structured around the passage of one day;

To the Lighthouse contains two days, bound by a narrow “bridge” of ten compressed

141 years. Woolf’s preoccupation with time is also evident in her diary, partly by its very form and partly by the uses to which she puts it. Her diary is often a storehouse for

“moments of being,” a term she first coined in her autobiographical piece “A Sketch of the Past,” written in the last two years of her life: “Many bright colours; many distinct sounds; some human beings, caricatures; comic; several violent moments of being, always including a circle of the scene which they cut out: and all surrounded by a vast space—that is a rough visual description of childhood” (MOB 79). It is noteworthy that the first instance of this famous phrase—used so often by scholars to describe Woolf’s fictional and modernist techniques—is preceded by the word “violent.” “A Sketch of the

Past” reveals the childhood sexual abuse that Woolf suffered at the hands of her half- brothers, and thus the phrase that is so integral to her approach to modernism is one built on a foundation of fear and shame; even the fondest memories—of the waves breaking on the shore at St. Ives, being held on her mother’s lap in a train carriage—are described as a series of “shocks” or “blows” (qtd. in Podnieks 128), suggesting a stoppage of time, an event that can cause the individual to move out of clock time and into personal time: “[I]t is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words” (MOB 72). This putting it into words is for Woolf the essential next step, the completion of the experience. It would be false to suppose that all such “moments of being” are built of negative experiences: In her last entry for 1932, Woolf longs for the ability to sum up the whole of life in a single moment, the moment she is living through.

This is in fact the last day of 1932, but I am so tired of polishing off Flush—such a pressure on the brain is caused by doing ten pages daily—that I am taking a morning off, & shall use it here, in my lazy way, to sum up the whole of life. By

142 that phrase, one of my colloquialities, I only mean, I wish I could deliver myself of a picture of all my friends, thoughts, doings, projects at this moment. […] For example, with Julian & Lettice Ramsay last night—why not simply become fluid in their lives, if my own is dim? And to use ones hands & eyes; to talk to people; to be a straw on the river, now & then—passive, not striving to say this is this. If one does not lie back & sum up & say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough. Always hurry. I am now going in, to see L. & say stay this moment. (D4 134-35)

In short, she stretches here in her diary for the same effect that her modernist novels achieve: the encapsulation of the whole of life in a single moment, which Michael

Cunningham has described as being analogous to the blueprint of an entire organism being contained in a single strand of its DNA (Schiff 118-19). The revelation of the real things behind appearances is, as Elizabeth Podnieks notes, the way that Woolf begins to perceive the “pattern” that lies “behind the cotton wool,” “that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art […].But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself”

(MOB 72). Podnieks suggests (123ff) that Woolf’s whole modernist project rests on individual moments, and that her modernism from the outset, from the earliest experimental stories “The Mark on the Wall” (1917), “Kew Gardens” (1919), and the pieces collected in Monday or Tuesday (1921), are all founded on the individual moment.

(And it is not surprising that one of her most famous “mood pieces,” an essay about night falling on people having a conversation in a garden and which is the precursor to her last novel, Between the Acts [1941], is called “The Moment: Summer’s Night.”)

It is of course beyond the scope of this study to analyze Woolf’s modernism in its entirety; such an endeavor might be futile, as would an attempt to define modernism in

143 general, given the size and slipperiness of the subject. By focusing on what I feel to be the major preoccupation of Woolf’s modernism—her use of, understanding of, and manipulation of time—I will illustrate how the diary is essential to the formation of her modernism in that it too can be viewed as a modernist work. This is not to suggest that all diaries are modernist; nearly all diaries are about time, to some extent, by their very nature. But Virginia Woolf’s diary particularly suits her as a modernist, given her modernism’s concerns. As Hermione Lee has noted, Woolf’s diary is something of a mixed bag: “Her diary, like her essays and stories and novels, blurs the lines between history, biography, and fiction” (8). Thus, I will also examine the places in which genre- blurring—another hallmark of modernism—occurs in the diary, and will speculate as to the degree to which Woolf was conscious that she was using her diary to new ends and creating a new form.

“Diary” versus “Journal”

Diary-keeping, by its nature, is the art of structuring time. The writer records his or her activities, thoughts, emotions, and memories on a daily or almost-daily basis, sometimes in dated books designed for such a purpose. Thomas Mallon, in A Book of

One’s Own: People and Their Diaries (1984), discusses the difference between a journal and a diary:

The first thing we should try to get straight is what to call them. “What’s the difference between a diary and a journal?” is one of the questions people interested in these books ask. The two terms are in fact hopelessly muddled. They’re both rooted in the idea of dailiness, but perhaps because of journal’s links to the newspaper trade and diary’s to dear, the latter seems more intimate than the former. (The French blur even this discrepancy by using no word recognizably like diary; they just say journal intime, which is sexy, but a bit of a mouthful.) One can go back as far as Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary and find him making the two more or less equal. To him a diary was “an account of the transactions, accidents

144 and observations of every day; a journal.” Well, if synonymity was good enough for Johnson, we’ll let it be good enough for us. (1)

Elizabeth Podnieks, in Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf,

Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin (2000), offers a more thorough examination of the historical differences between the terms which is worth quoting in full:

The blurring of these terms can be traced to historical definitions which, though registering subtle differences, tend to conflate the two. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “journal” preceded “diary.” The original meaning of “journal,” first recorded in 1355-56, was ecclesiastical: “A service- book containing the day-hours: = DIURNAL.” The function shifted in 1540: “A daily record of commercial transactions, entered as they occur, in order to the keeping of accounts. a. In a general sense = DAY BOOK.” Shortly after, in 1552, the journal became associated with the journey: “A book containing notices concerning the daily stages of a route and other information for travelers; = ITINERARY.” The year 1565 marked its appearance as “A record of public events or of a series of public transactions, noted down as they occur day by day or at successive dates, without historical discussion.” The journal as specifically “private” was first described in 1610: “A record of events or matters of personal interest kept by any one for his own use, in which entries are made day by day, or as the events occur.” What is particularly significant about this definition is the privileging of the journal’s value over the diary. The entry says of the journal: “Now usually implying something more elaborate than a diary.” Finally, beginning in 1728, the journal became synonymous with the newspaper: “A daily newspaper or other publication; hence, by extension, Any periodical publication containing news or dealing with matters of current interest in any particular sphere. Now often called specifically a public journal.” This usage makes its reputation as a public text explicit. The first definition of “diary” offered in the OED equates it with the journal: “A daily record of events or transactions, a journal; specifically, a daily record of matters affecting the writer personally, or which come under his personal observation” (my emphasis). The term was first coined in 1581 in a letter written by William Fleetwood: “Thus most humbly I send unto yor good Lo. this last weeks Diarye.” Later meanings of the term, circulated from 1605, include “A book prepared for keeping a daily record, or having spaces with printed dates for daily memoranda and jottings; also, applied to calendars containing daily memoranda on matters of importance to people generally, or to members of a particular profession, occupation, or pursuit.” Although more attention is given to the journal, especially as a public document—the OED entry for “journal” is over three times as long as the one for “diary”—it is difficult to distinguish the two. Coined as a term more than two hundred years later than the

145 journal, the diary seemed destined to develop in definitive ambiguity. It is recorded that in 1674 Heylin wrote, “A Diary or Journal, as the name imports, containing the Actions of each day.” And in 1765 T. Hutchinson commented, “Goffe kept a journal or diary.” (14-15)

Further, Podnieks explores the diary’s development alongside biography and autobiography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and traces the influence of

“life-writing” (letters, diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies) on novels like Samuel

Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748-49) (17). Podnieks describes the four different types of diaries proposed by Robert Fothergill in his Private Chronicles: A

Study of English Diaries (1974). The first and most basic type of diary is the itinerary, a detailed account of travel which might later prove useful to future travelers. The second is the public journal, intended for an audience, with information useful to the public.

These diaries often grow from personal diaries, but are distinguished by the writer’s knowledge that they will be seen by many readers. The third is the journal of conscience, which came to prominence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and which was intended to trace the writer’s behavior so that it might conform to

(predominantly Catholic) spiritual principles. The fourth is the personal memoranda, developed most fully in the eighteenth century, and consisting of jottings and notes of what one has done, seen, and heard on a given day (Podnieks 18-20). Most modern diaries, including Virginia Woolf’s are marked by the fact that they are a fusion of the four previously distinct diaristic modes. Woolf’s diary encompasses the travel writing, the journal of conscience (for while she certainly held no firm religious beliefs, she does take herself to task for her behavior—not getting writing done, quarrelling with her friends and family—and to this extent treats the diary rather like a confessional), the personal memoranda, and even, in its posthumous publication, the public journal. (It is

146 fair to argue that Woolf did not write the diary with this latter intention or mode in mind, but she does regularly question the diary’s possibly public future in its pages.)

“Dear Pepys…the only calm thing in the house.”

Virginia Woolf was well aware of the diaristic tradition, having read scores of published and unpublished diaries throughout her life. Barbara Lounsberry attempts to situate Woolf in a “community of diarists” and argues that diaries were among her favorite forms of reading, for the insight they provided into periods, lives, and works that ordinary biographies could not touch. She adds,

We know that Woolf valued diaries for their unsurpassed ability to capture the everyday life of past ages and that she turned to diaries repeatedly as primary source material when writing specific Common Reader essays, A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas, Flush, and many of her novels. In her first Common Reader volume, she pays tribute to John Evelyn’s massive diary and springboards from the diary to provide us with “Lives of the Obscure.” The Second Common Reader might be subtitled “In Praise of Diarists,” for here Woolf evokes and explores the worlds of Fanny Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth, two country parsons (James Woodforde and John Skinner), and Swift’s Journal to Stella. As noted before, Woolf wrote reviews of diaries, including Woodforde’s, Katherine Mansfield’s, Stendhal’s, and the Rev. William Cole’s. This is what I mean by her interaction with the community of diarists. Indeed, Woolf’s interest in diaries seems to have increased as she aged. In the final decade of her life, she read at least twenty-five diaries—more than two a year […] (204-05)

Lounsberry traces Woolf’s record of her reading of diaries throughout her own diaries, letters, and reading notebooks, and reveals that between the ages of fifteen and forty-one,

Woolf read at least sixty-four diaries, with the greatest number from the age of thirty-six onward, which, not coincidentally, is roughly the age when her own diary takes on its fullest shape and form.1 The first mention of Woolf reading a published diary is in March

1897, when she is fifteen:

1 For Lounsberry’s list of “Diaries Woolf Read,” see her “Virginia Woolf and the Community of Diarists,” in Virginia Woolf and Communities: Selected Papers from the Eighth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. by Jeanette McVicker and Laura Davis (New York: Pace U P, 1999), pages 207-210.

147 We had several perilous crossings before we reached the London Library, where father got some books. Then there were more crossings, and we arrived at fathers tailor in Bond St. where father ordered himself a whole new suit for the wedding. He bought some books at Sotherans and then we wandered down the middle of Piccadilly, till we came to a shelter. It is a miracle that I escape to write this. Gave back Sterling and got Pepys diary. (PA 62)

Throughout early April 1897, she is reading Pepys, and it seems clear that such reading was formative, as was that of Fanny Burney, Walter Scott, and James Boswell, all of whose diaries she read before she was twenty-two (Lounsberry 207). Consider the following passage from Pepys:

September 2, 1666 Lords day. Some of our maids sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast today, Jane called us up, about 3 in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose, and slipped on my nightgown and went to her window, and thought it to be on the back side of the Mark Lane at the furthest; but being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off, and so went to bed again and to sleep. About 7 rose again to dress myself, and there looked out at the window and saw the fire not so much as it was, and further off. So to my closet to set things to rights after yesterday’s cleaning. By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down tonight by the fire we saw, and that it was now burning down all Fish Street by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower and there got up upon one of the high places, Sir J. Robinson’s little son going up with me; and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge—which, among other people, did trouble me for poor little Michell and our Sarah on the Bridge. So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it begun this morning in the King’s baker’s house in Pudding Lane, and that it hath burned down St. Magnus’ Church and most part of Fish Street already. So I down to the waterside and there got a boat and through bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Michell’s house, as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way and the fire running further, that in a very little time it got as far as the Steelyard while I was there. Everybody endeavoring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off. Poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats or clambering from one pair of stair by the waterside to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons I perceive were loath to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were some of them burned, their wings, and fell down. (Norton 1846-47)

148 A few months after reading Pepys’s diary, Woolf records seeing Queen Victoria’s

Diamond Jubilee procession through London, and describes it as follows:

Today was the great Diamond Jubilee Day, very cloudy & still early in the morning, looking almost showery if such a thing dared happen. We got up at 7.30, & had breakfast rather past 8, starting in the carriage Nessa Thoby & I, at 8.30. We got to St Thomas’es Hospital at 9.30, & watched the soldiers & the crowd for some time. There the crowd was not allowed on the [Westminster] bridge, & we had nothing but lazy volunteers to look at. So we strolled in the hospital gardens & had ices: then we waited again. The procession was to pass at 1.30, but — at 12.30 a Captain Ames, & the sailors appeared & then followed troop after troop — one brilliant colour after another. Hussars, & Troopers & Lancers, & all manner of soldiers — then Indian Princes, & at last carriages with the little Princesses & the big ones — Finally the cream coloured ponies were sighted: every one stood up & waved: shook their pocket handkerchiefs, & stamped their feet — the Queen was lying back in her carriage, & the Pss. of Wales had to tell her to look up & bow. Then she smiled & nodded her poor tired head, & the whole thing moved on — But there was a great deal more to come — & it was not over till almost 2.30. Then luncheon & then home at 4.30. So ends the Jubilee day. (PA 103-04)

The passage marks one of the first times that Woolf records a public event in her diary, and it’s possible that her account was influenced by her reading of Pepys, for there is the same attention to detail, and the same slight detachment in her stance. It is a technique that Woolf will employ throughout the diary as it progresses, whenever she records a public event: Armistice Day, for instance, or demonstrations or marches, or the day that women get the vote. She often mirrors Pepys’s sense of immediacy, his attempt to record what he saw in vivid prose. Lounsberry concors that Woolf’s diary, during the early period in particular, benefited from her diary reading.

Woolf gained much from this community of diarists, which she would draw upon when writing her own diary. When she was fifteen, in April 1897, she called her “dear Pepys…the only calm thing in the house” (PA 66), and it is not too much to say that he showed her how to move briskly through a diary entry, just as he was briskly scurrying back and forth across London. Pepys’s pattern of home to office to a play or a visit to a coffee house and home again was one Woolf would follow. He offered her, at the age of fifteen, a vision of a busy London lifestyle that she would make her own. The echo of his writing style can

149 be heard in the following Woolf diary entry written thirty-six years after she first read him: “So to tea, & I should add so to Westminster to hear The March of the Women, Ethel Smyth; & Rebecca speaking on married womens [sic] earnings. Instead I shall sleep over the fire, reading Tom’s criticism, & Michael Field diaries, alone thank God” (D4 189). From Pepys she may also have learned to balance the record of her personal life with the larger events of her time—such as reports of war or strikes—and that inclusion of bouts with servants was not amiss. Woolf read the diaries of Lady Holland, the great hostess, when she was just beginning to make a living as a professional writer. “What numbers of likenesses she [strikes] off, and with what assurance!” Virginia exclaimed in admiration (Lee 212). From Fanny Burney, whom she returned to again and again throughout her life, Virginia may have borrowed the idea of writing her diary “at full tilt exactly as the words came into her head” (CR2 102)—that is, as an exercise in freewriting. Surely Woolf identified with Burney’s family situation: the mixed family of half-brothers and sisters; the mother’s early death; the adored, demanding father; the “endless confabulations, and confidences between sisters and brothers” (CR2 99). Certainly she is thinking back through this foremother (and perhaps projecting a bit) when she writes that Burney’s “awkward manners, concealed the quickest observation, the most retentive memory” (CR2 101), and it is from Burney that she adopted the practices of writing her opinion of people when she first met them (CR2 97) and stealing to her cabin at the end of the garden (so like Fanny’s) as soon as company left to “[write] down every word, every scene” (CR2 101). (205)

While her later diaries would change and become deeper and more introspective, the diaries kept by Virginia Stephen throughout 1897 are very much the traditional, family-oriented diaries of a fifteen year-old Victorian girl. That is was a family enterprise from the start is immediately evident in the first entry of her first extant diary:

“We have all started to keep a record of the new year—Nessa, Adrian and I” (PA 5).

These first entries detail outings, mishaps, evenings alone with their father, weather.

(They also contain the odd, circular “ciphers” referred to in Chapter One, which may have been marks to track her own menstrual cycle, either on the advice of doctors or of her half-sister Stella Duckworth [Curtis 53-54].) But the diary begins to change with the

“Warboys” journal of 1899, which Woolf kept on an August holiday at the Rectory,

Warboys, in Huntingdonshire. Her tone has been completely transformed, and while she

150 still records daily events, she allows for long-winded and often arch meditations, quite

unlike the material in her 1897 diary.

Monotony, so methinks, dwells in these plains. Such melting gray of sky, land & water is the very spirit of monotony. I lay in the punt, which has been padded with rugs & cushions & read a sleepy preaching [?] book; the diary of some ancient Bishop written in flowing ancient English that harmonised with this melancholy melodious monotony (what an awful sentence!) of bank & stream. Activity of mind, I think, is the only thing that keeps one’s life going, unless one has a larger emotional activity of some other kind. Ones mind thats like a restless steamer paddle urging the ship along, tho’ the wind is fallen & the sea is as still as glass. I must now expound another simile that has been rolling itself round in my mind for many days past. This is that I am a Norseman bound on some long voyage. The ship now is frozen in the drift ice; slowly we are drifting towards home. I have taken with me after anxious thought all the provisions for my mind that are necessary during the voyage. The seals & walruses that I shoot during my excursions on the ice (rummaging in the hold) are the books that I discover here & read. It amuses me to carry on the comparison, tho’ I admit that written down it has something absurd about it. What a force a human being is! There are worse solitudes than drift ice, & yet this eternal throbbing heat & energy of ones mind thaws a pathway thro’; & open sea & land shall come in time. Think tho’, what man is midst fields & woods. A solitary creature dependent on winds & tides, & yet somehow suppressing the might of a spark in his brain. What nonsense to write! (PA 138)

Though the entry may be “nonsense,” she is clearly having a good time, and is amusing herself with her overdone language, the “poetic” “thro’s” and “tho’s.” It is possible that by this time she had read some of Walter Scott’s travel diaries (L1 49), which could

account for some of the passage’s nautical imagery. The Warboys diary also contains a

long and vivid account of moth-hunting—a cherished Stephen family pastime—on 13

August, in which she is clearly testing her own powers of description, in an entry that is

again a far cry from the earlier, simpler record of visits and teas and outings:

He wears a large felt hat, & muffled round him is a huge brown plaid, which makes his figure striding in the dark most picturesque & brigand like. In his hand he carries a glass jar — of which more anon. 2ndly appears a female form in evening dress, a shawl over her shoulders, & carrying a large stickless net. 3rdly the lantern bearer (none other than the present writer) who lights the paths fitfully with a Bicycle lamp of brilliant but uncertain powers of illumination. Twice this

151 evening was the whole expedition confounded by the sudden extinction of the wick, which when extinct sends odours sufficient to attract or stupefy all the moths in the garden. This lamp when alight sheds an oval disk of light on to the backs of the van & occasionally slides like a will-o’-the wisp to explore the neighbourhood. (PA 144-45)

In September she starts a new book in the pages of Isaac Watts’s Logick: or, The Right

Use of Reason (see Chapter One), an indication that she is beginning to consider her diary

a crafted document.

The diary for 1903 is given over largely to writing exercises, with headings and

titles; it is clear that she is using the diary as a practice-ground for the literary essays that

she would begin to publish in December of the following year, first in the Anglo-Catholic

paper the Guardian, thanks to help of family friend Violet Dickinson. Much of 1903 was

taken up by her father Leslie Stephen’s slow and painful death from cancer, and it is

possible to argue that the exercises written in 1903 were an attempt to stay close to him in

his dying, to avoid facing his impending death on the page (there are very few “straight”

diary entries in this notebook), and to impress him, for the pieces (on subjects such as

Stonehenge, going to “an artistic party,” and glimpses of London like the Serpentine in

Hyde Park) are formal and not at all experimental or arch (like the over-the-top reverie in

1897), exactly the kinds of pieces that the former editor of the Dictionary of National

Biography, the eminent Victorian man of letters, would be proud of. She even includes an index at the beginning of the book, with appropriately numbered pages, to signal that this is a serious work, one that is meant to be read.

There is no extant diary for 1904, the year which began with Leslie Stephen’s death and ended with his daughter’s first professional publication. Her 1905 diary is written in a standard dated book, in which she does not always make daily entries. She

152 does however tailor the book to her own ends: she includes a list of books that she’s read

over the course of the year, and, under the heading “Work Done,” she lists the drafts of

essays she has completed (PA 274-80). The remaining notebooks collected in A

Passionate Apprentice, dated 1905 to 1909, are largely records of travel and narratives of place, detailing her visits to Cornwall (1905), Giggleswick (1906), Blo’ Norton (1906),

Greece (1906), Turkey (1906), Golders Green (1907), Playden (1907), Wells and

Manorbier (1908), Italy (1908), and Florence (1909). While these notebooks contain extremely vivid descriptions of landscapes, people, local customs and events, they are sufficiently un-“diary-like” in their extremely long entries and lack of daily chronicling that it is perhaps easy to understand why Anne Olivier Bell considers them apart from the

“main series” which begins in 1915 (D1 vii). But it becomes clear while reading the

Passionate Apprentice journals (and the title, by Mitchell Leaska, is decidedly well chosen, as the journals in the collection do indeed feel like apprentice work to the main series edited by Bell) that Woolf took her diary quite seriously, in all of its multiple forms. On the surface, it might appear that she could not settle on the proper form for her personal writing—she was not sure whether to use a special, dated, pre-made book or a blank notebook; she didn’t know whether to keep separate travel journals or keep such writings in her “main” book; she kept her literary exercises separate from the accounts of her day-to-day life. In A Passionate Apprentice, one can see Woolf trying out these different diaristic modes, which only later she will be able to fuse into a whole—at a period, not coincidentally, when she is also becoming a modernist.

153 “The diary habit”

There are no extant diaries for the years 1909 to 1915. This is a lamentable fact,

for these are some of the most interesting years of Woolf’s life. During this period, the

Bloombsury Group became a much more solid entity (if it ever was a solid entity—many

members of Bloomsbury deny the fact that the Group even existed2); the first Post-

Impressionist Exhibition in London (organized by Roger Fry) in December 1910 scandalized Edwardian sensibilities with its shocking and “decadent” art (prompting

Woolf later to write her oft-quoted observation that “on or about December 1910, human character changed” [CDB 96]); Woolf participated in the famous Dreadnought Hoax, wherein she, her brother Adrian, Duncan Grant, and several others posed as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his retinue and boarded a British dreadnought with full pomp and ceremony, to the embarrassment of the Navy and the asking of questions in the House of

Commons; Woolf began her first novel (see Chapter Two); and she met and married

Leonard Woolf. Thus, a number of important events go unrecorded in her diary. When her diary begins again, in January of 1915, it reads differently than the last volume of

1909. Woolf is now a married woman, and soon to be a published novelist. This return to the diary lasts only six weeks or so, until she suffers a nervous breakdown which causes all diary-writing to cease until 1917. When the diary resumes again, it seems to be a return to the Passionate Apprentice mode, in that this new diary is linked to a place—

Asheham, Leonard and Virginia’s first country home in Sussex—so much so that it is generally referred to by Woolf herself as the “Asheham diary,” to which she adds when she visits (the book presumably stays at Asheham), while occasionally bringing her full

2 For an entertaining discussion of who constituted Bloomsbury (an oddly contentious topic among the members themselves) and when exactly it was at its height, see Regina Marler’s Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), pages 6-17.

154 diary down to the house with her as well. The Asheham diary entries are quite unlike

those in her regular diary—they are shorter, more fragmented, and deal almost entirely in

descriptions of weather, natural phenomena (birds, animals, insects), and a seemingly

perpetual hunt for mushrooms. The following entry, from 5 August 1917, is typical of

the material Woolf writes in the Asheham diary:

Dull morning, getting steadily finer, until it became a very hot & sunny afternoon. Walked on M.’s walk. Saw 3 perfect peacock butterflies, I silver washed frit[illary]; besides innumerable blues feeding on dung. All freshly out & swarming on the hill. Small flowers out in great quantities. Found mushrooms, mostly in the hollow, enough for a dish. Barbara & Bunny after dinner stayed for tea & dinner. (D1 40)

The Asheham diary is deceptive. On first reading, one could assume that the entries are short and fragmented and curtailed because Woolf is only gradually coming back to a state of mental health after her breakdown. (And Leonard did often restrict her writing—including diary-writing—when she experienced episodes of mental illness.)

But the last Asheham entry for 1917 is on 4 October, as is typically brief and to the point.

Four days later, however, on 8 October, back in the Richmond suburbs at Hogarth House,

Woolf resumes her full diary (with a nod to the 1915 diary, found “in a wooden box in my cupboard,” whose entries are “still able to make us laugh at Walter Lamb” [D1 55]— a frequent figure of fun in that short-lived diary) with a long entry detailing her excitement about being back in the swing of life, and her shopping for pens and paper and boots (D1 55-56). So the Asheham diary is not written in its truncated form at the request of Leonard or her doctors—she herself sees that particular diary as different and distinct from her main one. Again, this is rather like her approach to diary-keeping in her youth: different books for different subjects. The Asheham diary eventually disappears

(the last entry in it occurs in October 1918) both when the Woolfs are forced to give up

155 Asheham when the landlord returns to occupy it and they buy Monks House as a

replacement, and when she appears to have grown tired of it. Hereafter, the diary will

consist of both her standard, daily, London-based entries, and entries referring to her time

in the country at Monks House, as well as of her travel journals. The diary settles, after

1919, into the form she will keep until her death—essentially one book to record the

whole of her life.3 There is one exception: Woolf continued to keep separate “reading notebooks” throughout her life, which were certainly not diaries or journals proper, consisting almost entirely of notes on her reading, to be used largely in the composition of her essays and non-fiction works. But as these notebooks only occasionally contain personal writing (mostly in the form of thoughts about the reading in question), I do not consider them part of the diary series.4

As discussed in Chapter One, Woolf was well aware of what she called “the diary

habit” among her friends, and lamented the fact that they did not share each other’s work,

though she herself was always ambivalent about revealing herself (D1 95). But her

interest in diaries was not merely personal: she wrote numerous critical essays about

diaries, both published and unpublished, and it is in these critical writings that she reveals

many of her opinions and preoccupations about “the diary habit,” and thereby delineates

the traits of other people’s diaries so that she may assess the strengths and weaknesses of

her own.

3 I am reminded of Anna Wulf, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), who keeps four separate journals, each representing a particular aspect of her life (political activity, fiction, a straight- forward diary, etc.) until a breakdown causes her to reassess her method and to begin recording all of her personal writing in a single, golden notebook. Virginia Woolf was never nearly so rigid in her distinctions between her notebooks, but there is the sense that she saw her early notebooks as being separate entities, a perception that appears to have vanished after 1919.

4 These notebooks have been edited and published by Brenda R. Silver as Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton: Princeton U P, 1983).

156 In one of her first published pieces on a published diary, “The Diary of a Lady-in-

Waiting” (1908), Woolf comes squarely against the tendency of editors to censor and

omit, particularly material that might be deemed unsuitable for a woman to write about.

Here, some of the material from Lady Charlotte’s diary that had been previously deleted

has been restored, resulting in a less compromised document: “At the same time Lady

Charlotte began to keep a diary, and it is this work which is now reprinted, with the

omission of certain unnecessary parts, and the addition of a great number of names which

the discretion of previous editors thought fit to conceal beneath a dash” (E1 195). From

the beginnings of her career as writer, therefore, Virginia Woolf was keenly aware of this

editorial dash, used so liberally in the censoring of writing by women. She speculates on

the mindset of a woman who kept a diary, knowing full well that both the present and

posterity would look upon it with censorious eyes: “Lady Charlotte returned to London in

1819, in order to introduce an orphan niece to the world. She was forty-four, and the

diary, though it is still as profuse as ever, describes merely the respectable life of a lady

living in good society, with the remains of beauty, and many memories of happier days”

(E1 198). “Merely the respectable life”—Woolf suggests that had Lady Charlotte used

her diary to the full, it might have recorded some living that might not have been so

respectable; she was, after all, a woman of “beauty” and “wit,” and was “the talk of

London when she came up to town in the last years of the eighteenth century” (E1 195).

It is not hard to imagine this early diary reading planting the seeds of the argument that would later flower in her 1931 essay “Professions for Women,” in which she suggests that women, in order to tell the truth about their lives in their writing, must kill “the

Angel in the House,” that perfect vision of Victorian domesticity that kept so many

157 women docile and proper and silent. Later in 1908, Woolf reflects again in “The Journal of Lady Elizabeth Holland” that diaries are often a compromised version of the truth, especially for women, who must be shown to be doing their “duty”:

An English traveller in the eighteenth century could not profit completely by the experience unless he wrote down what he had seen and reflected; something was always left over at the end of the day which had to be disposed of thus, and Lady Webster began her diary from such an impulse. It is written to propitiate her own eye when she reads it later in Sussex; to assure her that she was doing her duty with all her faculties; and that she was going about the world as a sensible young Englishwoman, much like other people. But one imagines that she would never feel on easy terms with this version of herself, and would turn to the pages more and more for a date or a fact, and would soon dissociate herself entirely from her reflections. Her case differs a little, however, from the usual one. From her earliest youth Lady Webster seems to have had a quality which saved her diary from the violent fate of diaries, and spared the writer her blushes; she could be as impersonal as a boy of ten and as intelligent as a politician. (E1 231-32)

The value, for Woolf, of reading women’s diaries is that one can often catch a glimpse of the real, living, breathing woman behind the formalities; much of the pleasure of personal writing is that the real self may peek out from behind the mask.

But what of men’s journals? Are they too as compromised as women’s? Woolf’s thoughts on Emerson’s journals suggest that she thought so.

Emerson’s Journals have little in common with other journals. They might have been written by starlight in a cave if the sides of the rock had been lined with books. […] [H]is journals do not show vanity so much as a painful desire to get the most out of himself and a precocious recognition of ends to be aimed at. His first object was to learn how to write. The early pages are written to the echo of great prose long before he could fit words that gave his meaning into the rhythm. […] A weaker mind, shut up with its finger on its pulse, would have used a diary to revile its own unworthiness. But Emerson’s diary merely confirms the impression he made on his friends; he appeared “kindly, affable, but self- contained…apart, as if in a tower”; nor was he more emotional writing at midnight for his own eye; but we can guess the reason. It was because he had convictions. His indefatigable brain raised a problem out of every sight and incident; but they could be solved if he applied his intellect. Safe in this knowledge, which time assured, he could live alone, registering the development,

158 relying more and more on his sufficiency, and coming to believe that by close scrutiny he could devise a system. (E1 335, 336, 337)

As noted in Chapter One, the diary of John Evelyn is compromised by the fact that it is

“sometimes composed like a memoir, sometimes jotted down like a calendar; but he never used its pages to reveal the secrets of his heart, and all that he wrote might have been read aloud in the evening with a calm conscience to his children” (CR1 78). In a discussion of the diary of Parson James Woodforde, she comments perceptively on the elusiveness of audience: “When James Woodforde opened one of his neat manuscript books he entered into conversation with a second James Woodforde, who was not quite the same as the reverend gentleman who visited the poor and preached in the church.

These two friends said much that all the world might hear; but they had a few secrets which they shared with each other only” (CR2 93). She praises Dorothy Wordsworth’s powers of observation, the fact that she “noted what was before her accurately, literally, and with prosaic precision” in contrast to Mary Wollstonecraft’s tendency to use everything she saw “to start her mind upon some theory, upon the effect of government, upon the state of the people, upon the mystery of her own soul” (CR2 164). But it is for

“my dear Pepys” that Woolf reserves her most rapturous praise. For her, Pepys’s diary is perhaps the summit of the diaristic art, and far from being a relic from the distant past, useful merely in the historical sense, it is a vibrant, living, and above all modern document:

This is due in part to the unstudied ease of the language, which may be slipshod but never fails to be graphic, which catches unfailingly the butterflies and gnats and falling petals of the moment, which can deal with a day’s outing or a merrymaking or a brother’s funeral so that we latecomers are still in time to make one of the party. But Pepys is modern in a deeper sense than this. His in modern in his consciousness of the past, in his love of pretty civilized things, in his cultivation, in his quick and varied sensibility. He was a collector and a

159 connoisseur; he delighted not only in books, but in old ballads and in good furniture. He was a man who had come upon the scene not so early but that there was already a fine display of curious and diverting objects accumulated by an older generation. Standing midway in our history, he looks consciously and intelligently both backwards and forwards. If we turn our eyes behind us we see him gazing in our direction, asking with eager curiosity of our progress in science, of our ships and sailors. Indeed, the very fact that he kept a diary seems to make him one of ourselves. (E2 235)

The description, with a change of name and personal pronoun, could easily describe

Woolf’s own diary. This essay, “Papers on Pepys,” is perhaps the closest Woolf ever comes to acknowledging Pepys as her model; it is also perhaps only in hindsight that she herself could have been completely aware of his influence. Woolf’s insistence that

Pepys’s modernity is dependent upon his “consciousness of the past” is significant, and it is a point to which I will return later.

Woolf’s perpetual critical preoccupation with diaries and their writers goes a long way towards explaining why she asks herself that essential question: “What sort of diary should I like mine to be?” (D1 266, emphasis mine). She was aware of the possibilities, and of the compromises and evasions and possibly nefarious deletions of future editors.

And yet she believed in the process, and kept at it consistently for twenty-four consecutive years. Both her essays and her comments in the diary itself suggest that she was concerned with the diary’s formal qualities, but not to the exclusion of the content.

When she calls Pepys’s diary “modern,” note that she is not discussing its formal qualities at all, but rather its stance, and the way that Pepys handles the material. “Papers on Pepys” was written in 1918, when Woolf was embroiled in the process of writing

Night and Day; it is fitting that she would discuss Pepys’s modernity while embroiled in that long novel. The following year she would compose “Modern Novels” (an earlier version of the later, more famous “Modern Fiction” [1923]), the first of her literary

160 manifestos on modernism. This essay, along with the later “Mr. Bennett and Mrs.

Brown” (1923), is essential to an understanding of the ways in which the diary of

Virginia Woolf may also be seen, along with her novels and short fiction, as a modernist text.

“Never, never to desert Mrs. Brown”: Form versus content

In his excellent survey of the approaches to Virginia Woolf’s modernism in The

Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (2000), Michael Whitworth notes the tendency to focus on the stylistic elements of Woolf’s modernism: her use of stream of consciousness, the publishing context of the Hogarth Press, etc. But, he argues, of equal importance is Woolf’s attention to the changing nature of subjectivity, the content of the modernist works that she and her contemporaries produced:

Like her modernist contemporaries, Woolf believed that changes in the modern world had changed subjectivity itself. What Lawrence described in 1914 as the “old stable ego” of character, and the coherent moral order which sustained it, no longer existed. However, there was no universal agreement about the new form of human subjectivity, and once again Woolf differs from many of her contemporaries. (“Modernism” 160)

Elsewhere, Whitworth succinctly describes some of the basic tenets of modernism as practiced during the “high modernist” period:

Many of the literary experiments of the period sought to represent human consciousness as experienced from within. Such experiments were often grouped under the heading “stream of consciousness,” but the term conflates distinct literary methods. The idea that the mind contains a “stream of consciousness” is a psychological hypothesis, first advanced in the late nineteenth century by William James. James claimed that even if, examining consciousness, we could isolate distinct images, they are meaningful only in relation to the conscious and semi- conscious ideas which flow around them. “Stream of consciousness” became literary terminology in 1918 when May Sinclair used it to describe Dorothy Richardson’s technique in her long novel Pilgrimage. As a literary term, it does not distinguish between the various kinds of consciousness and unconsciousness that various writers try to convey: some are concerned with the perceptual consciousness, some with intellectual consciousness, while others try to register

161 the effects of the Freudian unconscious on our conscious mental life. Moreover, Woolf and her contemporaries were often aiming to represent not the perspective of a single consciousness, but of several distinct consciousnesses; and, at times, of consciousnesses that were several but indistinct, a “group consciousness.” (Woolf 95)

It is striking that in both of her manifestos on modernism, Woolf says next to nothing about stylistic concerns, but focuses rather on content, and character in particular.

She was always ambivalent about “showy” writing, feeling that it highlights “the damned egotistical self” (D2 14), which weakened the writing of James Joyce and Dorothy

Richardson. She mistrusted the pyrotechnics of Ulysses and felt that they, along with

Joyce’s frequently scatological content, amounted to showing off:

I finished Ulysses, & think it a mis-fire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts. I’m reminded all the time of some callow board school boy, say like Henry Lamb, full of wits & powers, but so self-conscious & egotistical that he loses his head, becomes extravagant, mannered, uproarious, ill at ease, makes kindly people feel sorry for him, & stern ones merely annoyed; & one hopes he’ll grow out of it; but as Joyce is 40 this scarcely seems likely. I have not read it carefully; & only once; & it is very obscure; so no doubt I have scamped the virtue of it more than is fair. I feel that myriads of tiny bullets pepper one & spatter one; but one does not get one deadly wound straight in the face—as from Tolstoy, for instance; but it is entirely absurd to compare him with Tolstoy. (D2 199)

This famous put-down, often gleefully quoted by scholars in both the Woolf and Joyce camps, is not merely an example of Woolf’s presumed prudishness, but is in fact a key to understanding her modernism. While she publicly makes clear, in both “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” that she considers Joyce an important artist, in private she reveals that the kinds of fireworks he produces are not what she is after.

In “Modern Fiction” (and the earlier “Modern Novels”), Woolf expounds upon her quarrel with the Edwardians (specifically Galsworthy, Wells, and Bennett), and takes

162 them to task for focusing not upon the movements of the minds of their characters, but upon the trivial matters of plot and setting: “If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and enduring” (CR1 148). Further, she famously lays out a modernist position, one that readers of her fiction (and her diary) will recognize as her own:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it. (CR1 149-50)

Woolf expands this theory to arguably better effect in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs.

Brown,” in which she posits the elderly Mrs. Brown on a train. The Edwardians would treat her superficially, paying attention to the trivial minutiae of her existence:

I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman’s character? And they said: “Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe—” But I cried: “Stop! Stop!” And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs. Brown, that vision to which I cling

163 though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever. (CDB 112)

Woolf’s quarrel with the Edwardians—one that got her into something of a public feud

with Arnold Bennett5—is significantly not on the stylistic level: she does not attack

Galsworthy or Bennett or Wells for being poor stylists. Rather, it is their approach to

their content, their handling of character that she finds lacking. And though Woolf does

spend a good deal of her time in the diary discussing stylistic issues (particularly when

she is first forming the new method for writing Jacob’s Room—“no scaffolding; scarcely

a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright

as fire in the mist” [D2 13-14]), the focus of her art clearly lies in her delineation of character, as laid out in “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Closely tied to the emphasis on character is an emphasis on time, particularly how it affects characters and how characters move through it. As will be seen, Woolf’s diary also follows the modernist precepts she outlined in the 1920s to a remarkable degree.

A modern diary for a modern life

Virginia Woolf’s diary looks much like other people’s. Elizabeth Podnieks

describes the original manuscripts in detail in Daily Modernism 6, and they do not appear

unusual or specifically “modern.” Many of her volumes were bound by her and Leonard

using materials from the Hogarth Press, and thus they resemble some of the handprinted

books produced by the Woolfs in the 1920s—small, handmade, covered with bright

patterned paper. Thus, some of the volumes possibly look a bit “modern” only in that

5 Mark Hussey details the occasional swipes which Woolf and Bennett took at one another in print (24). He notes that she was surprised to find herself saddened at his death in 1931, for their “abuse” of one another could no longer continue (D4 16).

6 See Daily Modernism, p. 101-08.

164 they resemble the modernist productions issuing from the Hogarth Press. Within the diaries, while Woolf used “every possible combination and abbreviation of day, date, and month” (D1 ix), much to the dismay of her future editor Anne Olivier Bell, she did in fact date all of her entries (though she often got the date wrong), and thus did not treat the diary as a free-flowing, amorphous document. Her entries vary dramatically in length, but generally last a few paragraphs, on average. She does not do any particular formal experimentation in the diary—while her punctuation is haphazard (she nearly always drops apostrophes in the possessive case, abbreviates most names, and has an idiosyncratic use of the semi-colon and a perpetual use of the ampersand), it is almost always correct. If, then, Virginia Woolf’s diary has none of the formal hallmarks of her modernism, how can it be called a modernist text? As seen above, Woolf herself can be seen as placing the emphasis of her modernism on content—specifically, approach to character—rather than form, and thus it is to the content of the diary that we must turn in order to claim its status as a modernist work. But a question immediately arises: As

Michael Whitworth notes, Woolf’s modernism is in sharp contrast to what she herself calls the “materialism” of the Edwardians (“Modernism” 151), their emphasis on the trappings of society rather than on the inner lives of the characters. But one need only read ten or so consecutive pages of Woolf’s diary to find numerous examples of the

“materialism” she so detests in the Edwardians’ fiction. She (like Leonard) is obsessed with the prices of things, and records them in her diary; she mentions objects bought and numbers of copies of her books sold; what she and Leonard eat for breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner; who comes to visit for each meal; what she is wearing; where she has walked; which buses, trains (above and below ground) she takes to get to whichever destination

165 (shades of Mrs. Brown); from whom she has received (or not received) a letter. And yet

while the diary may contain the humdrum, “material” details that would not have been

out of place in an Edwardian novel, the life in which these details are embedded was

decidedly unconventional, and it is in the delineation of this character, this life, that the

diary becomes truly modernist.

Elizabeth Podnieks argues that if the writer of a diary lives a modern life, then the

diary he or she produces must, by extension, also be modern: “Women who lived

modernism as much as they wrote it necessarily inscribed that modernism within their

diaries, for diaries are life texts” (9). Virginia Woolf was a woman who lived in an

unconventional marriage, had a highly unconventional sister, was involved in an

unconventional love affair with another unconventional woman, wrote experimental and

unconventional novels. Woolf’s “Bloomsbury” life, even when she is not living in

Bloomsbury proper or in close contact with any members of her set, permeates nearly

every page of the diary. Woolf is part of a milieu, and her diary is a way of documenting

that milieu. When she and Leonard set up type and print T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,

when they publish the works of Freud, when they entertain “Leonard’s darkies” in their

living room and participate in left-wing political functions, when Woolf writes about

breaking the boundaries of the novel with Jacob’s Room, when she embarks on her affair with Vita, when she posits new kinds of freedom and independence for women—all of which are addressed in the diary—Woolf delineates a modern character on the page, one who is not unlike any of her fictional creations. The Woolf who appears in the pages of her diary is a character who lives and breathes, almost as if she exists solely to refute

Arnold Bennett’s assertion that Woolf’s characters do not live.

166 And while the diary lacks a certain amount of stylistic innovation, there are

elements in the diary’s presentation that also lend themselves to a modernist reading. As

seen in Chapter Two, Woolf’s prose in the diary during the composition of The Waves

(not coincidentally her most modern and experimental work) attains a loosenss and a

speed not seen elsewhere:

However, I now begin to see the Moths rather too clearly, or at least strenuously, for my comfort. I think it will begin like this: dawn; the shells on a beach; I dont know—voices of cock & nightingale; & then all the children at a long table—lessons. The beginning. Well, all sorts of characters are to be there. Then the person who is at the table can call out any one of them at any moment; & build up by that person the mood, tell a story; for instance about dogs or nurses; or some adventure of a childs kind; all to be very Arabian nights; & so on: this shall be Childhood; but it must not be my childhood; & boats on the pond; the sense of children; unreality; things oddly proportioned. Then another person or figure must be selected. The unreal world must be round all this—the phantom waves. The Moth must come in: the beautiful single moth. There must be a flower growing. Could one not get the waves to be heard all through? Or the farmyard noises? Some odd irrelevant noises. She might have a book—one book to read in—another to write in—old letters. Early morning light—but this need not be insisted on; because there must be great freedom from ‘reality’. Yet everything must have relevance. Well all this is of course the ‘real’ life; & nothingness only comes in the absence of this. I have proved this quite certainly in the past half hour. Everything becomes green & vivified in me when I begin to think of the Moths. Also, I think, one is much better able to enter into other’s— (D3 236)

As noted before, the entry suggests speed, image upon image coming quickly into her head, almost faster than she can take them down. It could be argued that the passage, in the rapidity of its tumbling images, recorded haphazardly as they come, is a form of stream of consciousness. When May Sinclair first coined the term (though it came originally from William James) in a 1918 review of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage

(“In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on.

167 And in neither is there any grossly discernable beginning or middle or end” [qtd. in

Podnieks 129-30]), she referred, of course, to a published book, one which had,

presumably, some revision. And yet Woolf’s unedited diary passage is remarkably akin

to the published work of Richardson and Joyce—and to her own novels. While

infrequent, the diary does contain such occasional stream of consciousness passages; her

“State of Mind” from 15 September 1926 (quoted on page 107 in Chapter Two), in which

she imagines “the wave” of depression crashing over her, is another example.

In addition, the manuscripts themselves give evidence to Woolf’s writing method,

and indicate that even when her prose style does not sound like stream of consciousness,

the sentences themselves were produced in a very rapid fashion. Anne Olivier Bell

remarks that there are remarkably few errors in the diaries, very little that is crossed out,

and that her use of the ampersand suggests speed, etc. (D1 ix-x). And indeed, Woolf’s

diary entries, even on the printed page, have a momentum to them, largely because of the

abbreviations, the dashes, the ampersands, and the punctuation. They flow rather like

stream of consciousness prose, and nowhere is this fact highlighted more directly than in

Leonard Woolf’s excerpts in A Writer’s Diary, which eliminate the ampersands, many of

the abbreviations, the misspellings (he corrects Woolf’s “lovabilility” [D1 310], so beloved by Anne Olivier Bell [D1 x] into “lovability” [AWD 20], thus rendering the word correctly, but also inaccurately) and correct the entries into a uniformity that robs them of their modern spontaneity. It is remarkable how the spelling out of the word “and,” when one has become accustomed to the ampersand, can slow one’s reading so substantially.

And the spelling out of people’s names from the abbreviations renders the diary at once more public, less private, and more plodding—Woolf, writing for herself, felt the need

168 only to write an initial and a dash, or an initial and a full stop, while A Writer’s Diary suggests to the reader unfamiliar with the original that she was far more meticulous in the writing. Thus, it seems fair to argue that the Writer’s Diary version of Woolf’s diary is a less modern text, stylistically, than the full version, simply due to its regularizing of

Woolf’s punctuation and style into a more “readable” format.

Judy Simons observes that Woolf was also well aware of the blurred styles of her diary, and argues that there is still a need for a structural principle in Woolf’s modernism:

She was quite clear-sighted about the mixture of literary forms the diary synthesized, and remained sensitive to the fluctuations of style as they were taking place. After one passage of philosophical speculation, she explained that “I write thus partly in order to slip the burden of writing narrative, as for instance; we came her a fortnight ago. And we lunched at Charleston & Vita came & we were offered the field & we went to see the farm at Lime Kiln” (D3 189). Yet even at such moments of self-parody she had no doubt that as a retrospective reader in years to come, “facts” would be more interesting to her than abstraction. “I shall want, as I do when I read, to be told details, details, so that I may look up from the page & arrange them too, into one of those makings up which seems so much truer done thus, from heaps of non-assorted facts than I can now make them, when it is almost immediately being done (by me) under my eyes.” Once again, she projected herself into the role of reader, a reader who would actively impose meaning and structure on the signs before her on the page. With her compulsive interest in formal issues, she tampered obsessively with the diary’s organization. Looking back on her old journals she was most struck by the spontaneous pattern they created without apparent authorial intervention. In 1918, for instance, reading the diary for the previous year, she noted, “how exactly one repeats one’s doings” (D1 200), in the familiarity of life’s natural rhythms. Still she could not resist the temptation to impose a narrative structure of her own. “I keep thinking of different ways to manage my scenes,” she wrote in November 1918, “conceiving endless possibilities; seeing life, as I walk about the streets, an immense opaque block of material to be conveyed by me into its equivalent of language” (D1 214). She began to organize her daily entries so as to draw attention to their narrative continuity, however artificial such continuity might have been. On Saturday 30 October 1926, sensible of the fact that she had not written up her diary for a month, Woolf began with the very phrase that she had used to conclude her entry of a month before. Grumbling then about the inroads made on her time by persistent visitors, she mimicked their pleas of “When may I come & see you!” (D3 113-14), continuing her next entry with the words “Too true a prophecy!” Not content to allow the spaces between the entries to speak for themselves, she felt compelled to provide

169 a deliberate gloss to draw attention to the diary’s narrative development. Similarly she wove a story from the routine details of daily shopping trips, travel arrangements and meetings with friends. On 14 November 1938, for instance, having just spent £5.10.0 on “a very charming bookcase,” she announced her intention of buying a dresser, only to begin the following entry for 15 November with the words “I did not buy the dresser” (D5 186). This method of isolating specific strands of her life to identify a narrative line suggests her need of a structural principle, however slight, to assure herself of her own control over the medium of her life. (181-82)

Woolf never could entirely abandon the business of “getting on from lunch to dinner,” but she managed to create subtle and interesting patterns in the plot of her life, patterns that serve the character she creates there, who is as sharp a character as any she created in her fiction.

H. Porter Abbott offers yet another example of Woolf’s drifting narrative technique in the diary. He cites the following passage, largely about the Woolfs’ dog,

Tinker:

The chief fact today I think is the development & discovery of Tinker’s character—all in the right direction. He was taken a long walk by the river the avenue & the Park; his spirit is great, but almost under control. He fell into the river twice; jumped out again; circled madly with a black poodle, & investigated several garden gates, which seem to have a fascination for him. He is a human dog, aloof from other dogs. Alix & Lilian were much as usual last night, save that Lilian had a dark patch on the top of her head, & heard almost perfectly; the dark patch is a cup for catching sound. A more modest, amiable, & yet quietly well informed & resolute character does not exist. (D1 60)

Porter offers the following lucid analysis:

In this characteristic entry, she moves without hesitation from point to point, guided only by the brilliance of what catches her eye: from Tinker, to his various adventures, to Alix and Lilian, to the curious cup on Lilian’s head, to Lilian’s character. In our context, what is also notable in this particular passage is the way in which the movements of the Woolfs’ “human dog” act as an inset organic metaphor for the motion of her pen. Woolf loved Tinker (as she loved most dogs) and grieved when she lost him. But there must have been a special appeal in the trajectory of his travels. It had exactly that “rambling” quality she prized in her diary, the openness to the “loose, drifting material of life” to anything “solemn,

170 slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.” Together, Tinker and her diary suggested a radical undoing of received narrative logic. (242)

“Are we growing old?”: The passage of time

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, most of Virginia Woolf’s modernist

fiction revolves around the theme of time. Judy Simons notes that this too is a

preoccupation of the diary:

The fascination with time, a recurrent subject throughout the years, is foregrounded in this contrived interaction between days. In the conscious recall of past events Woolf projects the radical modernist perspective on the relative nature of time itself. Repeatedly this is linked with her concentration on her own ageing process. “Time Passes” she called the central, deeply-wrought episode in To the Lighthouse. It could well stand as a title for her diary overall. Her own birthdays were landmarks, approached with trepidation. “The last day of being 35. One trembles to write the years that come after it: all tinged with the shadow of 40,” she wrote on 24 January 1918. And three months later she mused disquietingly, “Are we growing old? Are our habits setting in like the Trade Winds?” (D1 132). The passage of time, the only apparent formal property that consistently determined the sequence of individual entries, was also a theme that was to haunt her all her life. Her preoccupation with the interweaving of temporal levels—the past, present, and future lives—connects with her absorption with the self as subject. As the writer Joyce Carol Oates was later to remark in her own journal, “We don’t think of ourselves in the past tense: we are always present tense: to consciously record the past is therefore to invent a self to perform in it, consciously or unconsciously—that’s where the artifice comes in.” This topic, explored with such seriousness in Woolf’s novels, is crucial to the very concept of her diary. “How queer to have so many selves. How bewildering!” (D4 329) she wrote in 1935. Her heightened awareness of the natural fragmentation of the personality through time and the affective changes this involved is embodied in the diary’s format. She anticipated the future in the act of recollecting the past by imagining herself, in her early years as a diarist, as she might be at the age of fifty, using old volumes as an aid for her memoirs. Her natural dread at the approach of her thirty-seventh birthday was partly assuaged by such a thought. “I admit I don’t like thinking of the lady of 50,” she wrote. “Courage however. Roger is past that age, & still capable of feeling, & enjoying & playing a very considerable part in life” (D1 234). (183)

Woolf’s observation of her multiple selves has an obvious parallel in Clarissa Dalloway, who, on the day of her party, is confronted with her own many selves: the young woman

171 who kissed Sally Seton, the young woman who rejected Peter Walsh in favor of Richard

Dalloway, the mother incapable of understanding her own daughter, the wife who sleeps apart from her husband, the society matron who gives parties and is observed on the streets by her friends and neighbors as being both beautiful and somehow awful and terrifying. There is yet another self in Mrs. Dalloway for Clarissa: Septimus Warren

Smith, her doppelganger, who kills himself and thus somehow keeps her from doing the same. And all of Woolf’s selves—her childhood self, her current self, and the “old

Virginia” of fifty—often crowd around her and appear on the page at once, sometimes within the same entry. One gets the sense from reading Virginia Woolf’s diary that the fluidity of time was not merely a literary device for her—it was the way that she experienced time itself. An individual in the present moment is not only all that he or she has been, but also all that he or she will be. Thus, Woolf is, all in one entry, all in one moment, young Virginia, the current Virginia, and the old Virginia, at once.

The question of time and age became more critical for Woolf as the years wore on:

[…] [T]he passage of time could also be deceptive. She continually commented on how old her friends were looking and whether or not their appearance belied their years. Encounters with others made significant inroads on her perception of self. “We are not as old as Mrs Gray, who came to thank us for our apples” (D3 160), she remarked with relief (Mrs Gray was eighty-six), at the age of forty-five. In 1923 she took “Middle Age” as a conscious topic for discussion, noting that she and Leonard had started to attach more importance to hours than they used to, a sign of encroaching elderliness (D2 222). Yet ageing had its positive side. Her acute sense of the race against time found her “quicker, keener at 44 than 24—more desperate, I suppose, as the river shoots to Niagara” (D3 117). (Simons 183-84)

The fact that Woolf persisted in keeping the diary, despite the “race against time,” despite the fact that she could have been using such time on more “productive,” publishable

172 work, suggests that she understood Thomas Mallon’s assertion that “the accumulated past makes the shrinking future more bearable” (xv).

It is the individual moment to which Woolf returns: she longs, constantly, to stop time, to “stay this moment,” to allow herself or her characters to inhabit the moment fully, to have all of the past and future gathered in one at the moment. Nor did she imagine that this situation was singular, as Michael Cunningham observes:

Try to enter the consciousness of a person, any person, and you are led immediately to dozens of other people, each of whom is integral, each in a different way. Woolf understood that every character about whom she wrote, even the most marginal, was visiting her novel from a novel of his or her own, and that that other, unwritten novel had as its main concerns the passions and fate of this character—this dowager or child or septuagenarian, this young woman who appears in the novel at hand only long enough to walk through a park. (xii)

Woolf sums this up perhaps most eloquently on 27 August 1918, while reflecting on war, as she passes a row of German prisoners working the land: “The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one’s imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him—the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent” (D1 186).

173 Chapter Four: A Portable Room of One’s Own A Woman’s Diary

While questions of audience and intention, of the uses to which Virginia Woolf

put her diary when writing her fiction, of the ways in which the diary is or is not a

modernist text are important and interesting, we would be remiss if we ignored the very

personal function that the diary served in Woolf’s life. Leonard Woolf recognized this

role, and states in his preface to A Writer’s Diary that Woolf “used her diary partly, in the

normal way of diarists, to record what she did and what she thought about people, life,

and the universe” (AWD viii). Indeed, it could be argued that apart from its aid to her as

a professional writer, the diary’s primary benefit for Virginia Woolf was as a storehouse

for her reflections on her personal life, a place where such thoughts and feelings might be

“sorted” and “refined” and “coalesced” (D1 266) into a form in which they might make

more sense, or a kind of sense that they might not otherwise have attained. Woolf states

on numerous occasions throughout the diary how therapeutic the activity is, how the

writing sweeps up the disparate parts of her day and makes them coherent, how the

“fidgets” are soothed in the “casual half hours after tea.” It is impossible to know for

certain exactly why Virginia Woolf continued to keep a diary with such diligence for so

many years. As has been seen, we know roughly why she began, as part of a family project (“We have all started to keep a record of the new year—Nessa, Adrian and I” [PA

5]), and the sort of activity that a dutiful Victorian daughter—particularly one from so

literary a household as Leslie Stephen’s—would be encouraged to take up. And while it

is clear that Woolf derived a certain amount of professional benefit from writing the

diary—“I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing” (D1 266)—it is a

bit cold-blooded to suppose that the benefit stopped there. Alexandra Johnson, in The

174 Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Creative Life (1997), suggests that Woolf used her

private writing as a form of self-invention, a way of creating a distinct self:

Virginia Woolf, in a sense, had also invented herself in a series of solitary rooms. Born in 1882 into a “literate, letter writing, visiting” family and cultural world, she too had rebelled against the suffocating social constraints she’d inherited. The third child of a second marriage, she’d been fortunate in having parents suspicious of the solemn pieties of late-Victorian life. Her philosopher father, Leslie Stephen, was a scrappy, freethinking agnostic; her mother, Julia, a tireless social activist. Competition was stiff amid the boisterous clan of eight siblings, all clamoring for attention from a mother zealously driven by social ministry and from a father shrouded in scholarly solitude. “As a child,” Virginia wrote nearly forty years later, “my days…contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being.” The nursery, the library, the top-floor bedroom, quickly became her private sanctuaries. In the quiet corners of the Hyde Park Gate house, she converted its voluminous privacy into hours of scribbling, imitating her father and his industrious circle of famous friends who crowded the drawing room at teatime. (136)

Perhaps the most famous image Virginia Woolf ever conceived—more famous, arguably,

than the lighthouse—is of a room, a private room away from the demands of married and

family life where a woman could retreat, shut the door, and think her own thoughts. This

room, one of the most powerful symbols of twentieth-century feminism, coupled with the

requisite £500 a year, would enable women to write the books that their brothers had

been producing unimpeded for centuries, would allow Shakespeare’s sister her own

chance at greatness, would permit “Anon” to step forward, finally, from the shadows.

We know that Virginia Woolf, for all of the very real privacy she had, for all of the

respect which Leonard Woolf paid to her literary endeavors, was often interrupted in her

work, either by Leonard, the servants, or unannounced guests, or was forced to attempt to

write while others were present: “A psychologist would see that the above was written

with someone, & a dog, in the room” (D5 351). And yet, more often than not, it seems clear that Woolf saw her diary as a portable room of her own, a place where, even if she

175 was not literally alone when writing it, even if Leonard caught occasional glimpses of it,

she could think her own thoughts, say what she thought about herself, about life, and

about the people and places in her life.

This is not to suggest that Virginia Woolf was always truthful in her diaries.

Quentin Bell famously recalls in his introduction to Volume One of the published diary

an excerpt from his father Clive Bell’s Old Friends (1956), in which Clive recounts an

evening spent with Leonard Woolf and other friends, during which Leonard read from

Virginia’s diaries:

Well do I remember an evening when Leonard Woolf, reading aloud to a few old friends extracts from these diaries, stopped suddenly. “I suspect,” said I, “you’ve come on a passage where she makes a bit too free with the frailties and absurdities of someone here present.” “Yes,” said he, “but that’s not why I broke off. I shall skip the next few pages because there’s not a word of truth in them.” (qtd. in D1 xiv)

Quentin Bell adds this caveat:

One would like to know which passage it was that Leonard Woolf censored. I do not think that there is any substantial part of the diary of which it can fairly be said that “there’s not a word of truth” in it. Certainly there is much which is dubious gossip, much that is exaggerated, much that is inaccurate, and there may be some pure fantasy. This is more true of the letters than of the diary. In her letters she certainly invents; sometimes she invents in order to amuse, knowing very well that she will not be believed by the recipient. But in her diaries she is not trying to be entertaining, and such fantasies are rare. She certainly is untruthful in her assessment of people: that is to say that she is true only to her mood at the moment of writing, and when the mood changes she often contradicts herself, so that when she writes a great deal about one person we frequently end with a judgement [sic] balanced between extremes. But although she is biassed [sic] and at times misinformed or careless, she does not consciously tell lies to herself, or even for the benefit of some future reader. The editor has frequently had occasion to correct her upon points of detail, but never, I think, has she discovered a complete fabrication. (D1 xiv)

Hermione Lee concurs, up to a point, claiming that there is much that Virginia Woolf does not talk about in her diary, and that while “[a]ll readers of Virginia Woolf’s diaries

176 (even those who have decided to dislike her) will feel an extraordinary sense of intimacy with the voice that is talking there” and that “[t]hey will want to call her Virginia,” there is still the possibility that “the sense we get from Virginia Woolf’s diaries of knowing everything about her is, perhaps, illusory” (4, 5).

Nevertheless, there is a distinct sense that for Woolf, much of life did not actually exist until she had written about it, either in an essay, in a piece of fiction, or in her diary:

“it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words” (MOB 72). It is the intention of this chapter to examine the ways in which Woolf “makes it real,” the ways in which she uses her diary to examine, to maintain, even to create her personal relationships, her political activities, and her conception of herself as a woman. Each of the relationships discussed in this chapter—with Leonard Woolf, with Vanessa Bell, with Vita Sackville-

West, and with her own conception of herself as a woman—has been the subject of multiple books, and it is beyond the scope of this study to provide a thorough discussion of each. Instead, I will focus on one particular aspect of each relationship, and examine its depiction in the diary. Though I agree with Hermione Lee that there are certainly places in the diary where Woolf is deliberately evasive, places in which she does not seem particularly honest with herself, and places where her account of events differs markedly from accounts in her letter (seen particularly in her liaison with Vita Sackville-

West), I believe that there is scarcely a corner of Woolf’s life not swept by the diary, and thus it is one of the most important documents she ever produced, for in producing it, she produced her life itself.

177 “The happiest couple in England”: A Wife’s Diary

The marriage of Leonard and Virginia Woolf is perhaps one of the most discussed

and hotly debated marriages in twentieth-century letters. Hermione Lee notes that

whenever she would mention her biography-in-progess to friends or colleagues, the same

four questions would always arise, one of which was “Was Leonard a good or a wicked

husband?” (3)1 There are two distinct schools of thought in Woolf studies about

Leonard’s virtues or faults as a husband, both stemming largely from the 1972 publication of Quentin Bell’s biography of his aunt, in which he presents a portrait of

Leonard as the devoted caretaker to the mad genius. Feminist scholars immediately took issue with this interpretation, most prominently Ellen Hawkes Rogat in “The Virgin in the Bell Biography” (1974). Many other scholars followed suit, so that to this day there are pro-Leonard and anti-Leonard Woolf scholars. The discussion does not seem to be abating: the publication of Irene Coates’s highly controversial Who’s Afraid of Leonard

Woolf: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf (2000) and the depiction of the Woolf

marriage in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) and its 2002 film version represent

opposite poles in the argument.2 Nearly every biographer of Woolf has taken some

position on Leonard, but the two “standard” biographies, Quentin Bell’s and Hermione

Lee’s, both are in agreement that the Woolfs’ marriage was strong, stable, and of

immeasurable benefit to Virginia herself. The support for such a belief comes largely

from Woolf’s diary, where she presents a portrait of a marriage that, while extremely

1 The other three questions were, “Is it true that she was sexually abused as a child? What was her madness and why did she kill herself? […] Wasn’t she the most terrible snob?” (Lee 3).

2 At the Fourteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf in London in 2004, Leonard Woolf’s nephew, Cecil Woolf, in the middle of a discussion about his memories of Virginia, touched my arm and asked plaintively, “Why do so many people hate Leonard so much?” I had no answer for him.

178 unconventional, thrives and continues and, as Hermione Lee puts it, works (315).

When she and Leonard married in August 1912, she was not keeping a diary. But she and Leonard wrote a great many letters to each other, and one of these has often been seen as providing a key to their marriage and its parameters. As both Bell and Lee assert in their biographies, it must be read in full for an understanding of Woolf’s thoughts both on marriage and on the man she was about to marry:

May 1st [1912] Dearest Leonard, To deal with the facts first (my fingers are so cold I can hardly write) I shall be back about 7 tomorrow, so there will be time to discuss—but what does it mean? You can’t take the leave, I suppose if you are going to resign certainly at the end of it. Anyhow, it shows what a career you're ruining! Well then, as to all the rest. It seems to me that I am giving you a great deal of pain—some in the most casual way—and therefore I ought to be as plain with you as I can, because half the time I suspect, you’re in a fog which I don’t see at all. Of course I can’t explain what I feel—these are some of the things that strike me. The obvious advantages of marriage stand in my way. I say to myself. Anyhow, you’ll be quite happy with him; and he will give you companionship, children, and a busy life—then I say By God, I will not look upon marriage as a profession. The only people who know of it, all think it suitable; and that makes me scrutinise my own motives all the more. Then, of course, I feel angry sometimes at the strength of your desire. Possibly, your being a Jew comes in also at this point. You seem so foreign. And then I am fearfully unstable. I pass from hot to cold in an instant, without any reason; except that I believe sheer physical effort and exhaustion influence me. All I can say is that in spite of these feelings which go chasing each other all day long when I am with you, there is some feeling which is permanent, and growing. You want to know of course whether it will ever make me marry you. How can I say? I think it will, because there seems no reason why it shouldn’t—But I don't know what the future will bring. I'm half afraid of myself. I sometimes feel that no one ever has or ever can share something—Its the thing that makes you call me like a hill, or a rock. Again, I want everything—love, children, adventure, intimacy, work. (Can you make any sense out of this ramble? I am putting down one thing after another). So I go from being half in love with you, and wanting you to be with me always, and know everything about me, to the extreme of wildness and aloofness. I sometimes think that if I married you, I could have everything—and then—is it the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange. Why should you? What am I

179 really except a pleasant attractive creature? But its just because you care so much that I feel I’ve got to care before I marry you. I feel I must give you everything; and that if I can’t, well, marriage would only be second-best for you as well as for me. If you can still go on, as before, letting me find my own way, as that is what would please me best; and then we must both take the risks. But you have made me very happy too. We both of us want a marriage that is a tremendous living thing, always alive, always hot, not dead and easy in parts as most marriages are. We ask a great deal of life, don’t we? Perhaps we shall get it; then, how splendid! One doesn’t get much said in a letter does one? I haven’t touched upon the enormous variety of things that have been happening here—but they can wait. D’you like this photograph?—rather too noble, I think. Here’s another. Yrs. VS (L1 496-97)

The letter is remarkable for its brutal honesty and for the equivocal nature of Woolf’s

position. As Hermione Lee asks, “Is this the letter of someone who does, or does not,

want to marry?” (306). Throughout the month of May, 1912, Woolf mulled over the

prospect, finally agreeing to marry Leonard on 29 May, which Quentin Bell famously

calls “the wisest decision of her life” (QB1 187).

A number of assumptions about the Woolfs’ marriage immediately became

apparent.3 Virginia’s much-vaunted virginity was often the subject of jokes among the members of the Bloomsbury Group; Clive Bell once wrote to his mistress Mary

Hutchinson in 1918 that “Wolf [sic] fucks her once a week but has not yet succeeded in breaking her maidenhead. They have been married six years. It gives her very little pleasure. Nothing could be more private” (qtd. in Lee 326). Virginia herself gives a fairly unenthusiastic account of sex with Leonard after the honeymoon in a letter to her friend Ka Cox:

Why do you think people make such a fuss about marriage and copulation? Why do some of our friends change upon losing chastity? Possibly my great age makes it less of a catastrophe; but certainly I find the climax immensely exaggerated. Except for a sustained good humour (Leonard shan’t see

3 In nearly all Bloomsbury correspondence, Leonard and Virginia were routinely referred to as “the Woolves.”

180 this) due to the fact that every twinge of anger is at once visited upon my husband, I might be still Miss S. (L2 6-7)

While this is hardly a rapturous account of a fulfilling sex life, there is still no reason to suppose that the “virgin Virginia” image presented by Clive Bell and others is accurate.

Quentin Bell presumes that her sexual frigidity was the result of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child and young woman at the hands of Gerald and George Duckworth, her half-brothers (QB2 5-6); this standard has been taken up by many others, most obviously

Louise De Salvo in Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (1989), who places the sexual abuse at the center of Woolf’s life and thereby sees nearly all of Woolf’s work as stemming from that source. But even a cursory reading of the diary reveals a marriage that is far from being completely sexless, one that is full of love, tenderness, affection, and more than a hint of a sustained physical relationship of some kind.

By the time Woolf resumes writing her diary in 1915, the marriage is two and a half years old. In that time, Leonard had assumed the role of caretaker to the ill Virginia, who had “gone mad” soon after their marriage—which many scholars, including

Hermione Lee (325) reasonably read as a reaction to the shock of suddenly having to become a sexual being in a marriage—a role that had previously been played by Vanessa

Bell, who, to some extent, seemed content to shift the burden to Leonard, embroiled as she was at that point in an affair with Roger Fry. It is unclear just how much Leonard

Woolf knew about Virginia’s periods of mental instability when he married her; there is the implication that Vanessa and others did not make this entirely clear. Whatever the case, Leonard rose to the challenge, and performed the role for the rest of Virginia’s life—and, some would argue, even after her death, in the form of his vigorous caretaking

181 of her posthumous literary reputation. Lee notes that

Her “series of catastrophes” changed the marriage for ever. They survived it and remained a couple, but it reshaped their life together. And, though Leonard Woolf was not the cause of her breakdown, his effect on her partly triggered, and partly provided the material for, the obsessions and anxieties and delusions of its most serious phases. (326)

By 1915, when the diary begins again, Leonard had moved Virginia to Richmond, then a somewhat distant suburb (though central London could be reached by train in half an hour), and she was steadily regaining strength, though she would suffer a relapse and not return to the diary until 1917. The entries in these years describe the patterns of their marriage, patterns they would follow for the rest of their married lives. Her second entry for 1915, on 2 January, describes a typical day in the life of the Woolfs:

This is the kind of day which if it were possible to choose an altogether average sample of our life, I should select. We breakfast; I interview Mrs Le Grys. She complains of the huge Belgian appetites, & their preference for food fried in butter. “They never give one anything” she remarked. The Count, taking Xmas dinner with them, insisted, after Pork & Turkey, that he wanted a third meat. Therefore Mrs Le G. hopes that the war will soon be over. If they eat thus in their exile, how must they eat at home, she wonders? After this, L. & I both settle down to our scribbling. He finishes his Folk Story review, & I do about 4 pages of poor Effie’s story; we lunch; & read the papers, agree that there is no news. I read Guy Mannering upstairs for 20 minutes; & then we take Max [a dog] for a walk. Halfway up to the Bridge, we found ourselves cut off by the river, which rose visibly, with a little ebb & flow, like the pulse of a heart. Indeed, the road we had come along was crossed, after 5 minutes, by a stream several inches deep. One of the queer things about the suburbs is that the vilest little red villas are always let, & that not one of them has an open window, or an uncurtained window. I expect that people take a pride in their curtains, & there is great rivalry among neighbours. One house had curtains of yellow silk, striped with lace insertion. The rooms inside must be in semi-darkness; & I suppose rank with the smell of meat & human beings. I believe that being curtained is a mark of respectability — Sophie used to insist upon it. And then I did my marketing. Saturday night is the great buying night; & some counters are besieged by three rows of women. I always choose the empty shops, where I suppose, one pays ½[d] a lb. more. And then we had tea, & honey & cream; & now L. is typewriting his article; & we shall read all the evening & go to bed. (D1 4-5)

The placement of the entry is interesting, given that this is the first diary that Woolf has

182 written as a married woman. It is almost as though she is announcing to the diary (and to herself), “This is my life. This is how it is structured. This is how Leonard and I go about our days.” Woolf consistently made a point in her diary of commenting on the new year, and often started new volumes on 1 January, and thus this entry also seems to be a way of marking time, of stating the current situation for posterity. The walks, the discussion, the work, the reading all would be hallmarks of Leonard and Virginia’s daily existence, and while the entry is not overly effusive, she clearly enjoys their routines, and seems to relish, even to thrive, on the structure it provides—which, after all, was one of the reasons why Leonard insisted upon the move to Richmond, away from the social turmoil of London.

Woolf’s admiration and love for her husband is clear in 1917 when he receives notice of his conscription. She records in the diary several nerve-racking visits to various doctors and specialists, seeking exemption for him.

We had a horrid shock. L. came in so unreasonably cheerful that I guessed a disaster. He has been called up. Though rather dashed for 20 minutes, my spirit mounted to a certainty that, save the nuisance, we have nothing to fear. But the nuisance—waiting a week, examination at 8.30 at Kingston—visits to Craig & Wright for certificates—is considerable. It was piteous to see him shivering, physically shivering, so that we lit his gas fire, & only by degrees became more or less where we were in spirits; & still, if one could wake to find it untrue, it would be a mercy. (D1 56)

Today poor L. had to go the round of Drs & committees, with a visit to Squire thrown in. His certifications are repeated. He weighs only 9.6. (D1 58)

Saturday was entirely given over to the military. We are safe again, &, so they say for ever. Our appearance smoothed every obstacle; & by walking across Kingston we got to the doctor about 12, & all was over by half past. I waited in a great square, surrounded by barrack buildings, & was reminded of a Cambridge college—soldiers crossing, coming out of staircases, & going into others; but gravel & no grass. A disagreeable impression of control & senseless determination. A great boarhound, emblem of military dignity I suppose, strolled across by himself. L. was a good deal insulted: the drs. referred to him as “the

183 chap with senile tremor”, through a curtain. Mercifully the impression slowly vanished as we went about Richmond. (D1 59)

We took the Bus to Kingston; visited for the last time let us hope in our lives, the Recruiting Office, & after waiting in the familiar room with the two wooden benches, the towel hanging up & the khaki coat, L. was summoned, & given his paper which states that he is “permanently & totally disabled.” We suppose this might fetch £500 if sold. (D1 72)

She downplays her very real fears: had Leonard been conscripted she would have been on her own, and she did not feel sufficiently able to care for herself for long periods of time.

The joking nature of the material—the mention of possibly selling the exemption, for instance—may have been for Leonard’s benefit, for this was not long after Woolf’s discussion of Leonard adding his own comments to the diary, and thus Leonard might have been seeing passages from the diary (by invitation or not) at this time. Or perhaps the joking is to alleviate her own anxiety.

Contributing to the perception of the Woolfs’ marriage as sexless is the fact that not once does Virginia Woolf directly describe any sexual activity between them. Given all of the legendary Bloomsbury frankness, this is somewhat surprising, but is in keeping with Woolf’s pattern of occasionally outrageous comments in letters to shock and amuse her friends, and a degree of reticence about physical matters in the diary—for example, to

Lytton Strachey (who would have appreciated this), she describes Sydney Waterlow’s visit to the house, and his plans to “live next door to us at Richmond and there copulate day and night and produce 6 little Waterlows. This house for a long time stank to me of dried semen” (L2 67); such frankness scarcely appears in the diary. She is even unable to write out the word “fuck,” and describes Leonard and Desmond MacCarthy looking up the word “f—” in the slang dictionary at the London Library (D1 82). But on 10

November 1917, in an entry which recaps the preceding four days, she describes

184 Leonard’s displeasure with her for attending a Bloomsbury party, and records the bad mood’s outcome:

[…] the prelude to a party [at 46 Gordon Square] on Thursday, to which I went, through the wet & the dirt, a very long expedition for 2 hours of life, though I enjoyed it. The usual people were there, the usual sensation of being in a familiar but stimulating atmosphere, in which all the people one’s in the habit of thinking of, were there in the body. A great many mop headed young women in amber & emerald sitting on the floor. Molly, Vanessa & I represented mature matronhood. Oliver seemed to be the friendly & amorous Uncle. Ray one might call the grandmother; very commanding, immensely well nourished, & competent. I spent most of my time with Oliver, & as the clock struck 10 I got up and went—an example of virtue if ever there was one. And now we see how the gloom came about. L. was testy, dispiriting, & tepid. We slept. I woke to a sense of failure & hard treatment. This persisted, one wave breaking after another, all day long. We walked on the river bank in a cold wind, under a grey sky. Both agreed that life seen without illusion is a ghastly affair. Illusions wouldn't come back. However they returned about 8.30, in front of the fire, & were going merrily till bedtime, when some antics ended the day. (D1 73)

It is difficult not to read these “antics” as sexual, as a code word for, if not sexual intercourse, then for a certain degree of playing or caressing. (Such code would also be used to describe her own menstrual cycle.) Hermione Lee concurs, claiming,

[…] Virginia Woolf’s sexual squeamishness, which plays a part in the indirections and self-censorship of the novels, is combined with a powerful, intense sensuality, an erotic susceptibility to people and landscape, language and atmosphere, and a highly charged physical life. “Frigid” seems a ridiculously simplistic description of this complicated, polymorphous self. (327)

Equally ridiculous to Lee is the “standard image of Leonard Woolf as a full-blooded heterosexual sacrificing himself on the altar of her genius” (327), and she too turns to the diary and the letters for evidence that while the marriage may not have been conventionally “normal” in sexual matters, it still maintained a level of physical, and certainly emotional, intimacy:

[T]he simple view of the Woolfs’ marriage as a-sexual and over-controlled, the product of child abuse and madness, with all her erotic feeling directed towards women, and all this compensated for by work and pets, doesn’t incorporate, or is

185 embarrassed by, the deep tenderness of those references to “my inviolable centre,” and the evidence of an erotic secret life. The pet names, the animal games, the “little beasts,” the “marmots,” coming out to play or being given an airing, the cuddling and nuzzling and kisses: these “antics” are often referred to in the letters and diaries of the early years. When in 1933 she re-reads her diary for 1915, she looks back with tears in her eyes on their days in the Green: “Our quarrels; how he crept into my bed with a little purse, & so on; how we reckoned our income & I was given tea free for a treat.” But this sort of intimacy is still going on in 1936: “A great deal of fuss about the marmots. In fact, these weeks of solitude, seeing no one…have space & quiet thats rather favourable to private fun.” This is not an a-sexual marriage, but one which thrives on affectionate cuddling and play. (327-28)

In hindsight its seems clear that the virginal image of Virginia Woolf (perpetuated,

perhaps, by the popularity of the Beresford photograph of Woolf—then Virginia

Stephen—from 1902, on book covers, posters, even t-shirts, in which she looks young,

virginal, dressed in white4) rests largely on the testimony of people outside of the

marriage, and from Quentin Bell’s own interpretation in his biography, which was,

naturally, colored by his father Clive Bell’s opinions. The full publication of the letters

and diary allows readers to reject these outsiders’ perceptions and biases, and allows for a

more expansive, more fluid definition of “normal” physical relationships between

spouses.

The diary of Virginia Woolf is striking for the number of instances in which

Woolf describes her delight in Leonard’s company. He is her “real life”: “But I was glad

to come home, & feel my real life coming back again—I mean life here with L. Solitary

is not quite the right word; one’s personality seems to echo out across space, when he’s

not there to enclose all one’s vibrations” (D1 70). He makes her “comfortable & secure”

(D1 223); she “salutes” him “with unstinted, indeed childlike, adoration” (D3 29); she

4 See Brenda R. Silver’s Virginia Woolf Icon (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999) for an extremely lucid account of the visual iconography of Virginia Woolf, and how it affects people’s impressions of her; for the Beresford photograph, see especially pages 278-79.

186 “snuggles” into “the core of my life, which is this complete comfort with L.” (D3 30);

indeed, they are “the happiest couple in England” (D1 318). But this is not to suggest that the diary never records moments of discord. One of the most persistent sources of conflict in their marriage was his family, and its obvious Jewishness:

I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh: otherwise I think (in Saxon’s phrase) there is something to be said for Flora Woolf. She can typewrite, do shorthand, sing, play chess, write stories which are sometimes accepted, & she earns 30/ a week as the secretary of the Principal of the Scottish Church in London. And in doing these various arts she will keep lively till a great old age, like a man playing with five billiard balls. (D1 6)

Much has been made of Woolf’s presumed anti-Semitism; critics often point out Woolf’s famous assertion in a letter to Violet Dickinson in June 1912 that she is about to marry a

“penniless Jew” (L1 500). But just as many scholars read Woolf’s remarks as the standard upper-middle class British viewpoint of the time, and view Woolf as merely the product of her upbringing. Jean Moorcroft Wilson, the wife of Leonard’s nephew Cecil

Woolf, does not see Virginia as anti-Semitic, but instead argues that “many of Virginia’s apparently anti-Semitic remarks were the result of perfectly natural family tensions, the one serious cause of conflict between herself and Leonard Woolf” (9).5 Indeed, Woolf’s

comments about Leonard’s family are generally mild compared to the things he said

about them, most obviously in his 1914 novel The Wise Virgins, in which Mrs. Woolf, in

the form of the protagonist’s mother, Mrs. Davis, is presented as a shrill, boring,

tiresome, meddling old woman. But Virginia Woolf would occasionally say nice things

about her mother-in-law, writing to Philippa Strachey in 1922 that “I get on well with

Mrs Woolf. She reads Rasselas. Isn’t the world odd?” (L2 512), and while her feelings

5 See Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s Virginia Woolf and Anti-Semitism (London: Cecil Woolf, 1995), part of the Bloomsbury Heritage series. Wilson also reveals that her husband never made it past Woolf’s notorious remark about not liking the Jewish voice, and has yet to read Woolf’s diary in full.

187 were a source of discord, she did her best to keep them hidden. This is where the diary serves a primary function for her: one gets the impression that the diary was her safety valve, the place where she could not only revel in the delights of married life, but complain of the duties which being a wife entailed. By World War II, of course, her political outlook had hardened into a hatred of nationalism and fascism, and she was corresponding regularly with anti-war activists, and was herself writing against all forms of oppression, most notably in Three Guineas (1938). It is noteworthy that by this time, nearly all anti-Semitic remarks in the diary have ceased.

Hermione Lee closes her chapter on the Woolfs’ marriage with an anecdote which, for me, sums up many of the reasons why the marriage was such a success:

One story, told differently by Virginia and by Leonard, gives a revealing glimpse of his character and of the reason why—after everything has been said about their marriage—she liked him. In Downhill All the Way, Leonard remembers them returning from an evening spent with Vanessa in her studio in Fitzroy Street. (This was in 1930.) A drunk woman was being abused by two passers-by and was then accosted by a policeman who seemed to Leonard to be “deliberately trying to goad her into doing something which would justify an arrest.” He lost his temper, challenged the policeman in front of a small crowd, and made him let the woman go. What Leonard omitted to mention in his reminiscence was that he and Virginia had been to a fancy-dress party for Angelica’s eleventh birthday. Virginia was dressed as a (“mad”) March Hare, with a pair of hare’s ears and paws. Roger Fry, at the party, had been a wonderfully characterful White Knight. And Leonard was “wearing a green baize apron on a pair of chisels as the Carpenter.” But as he tackled the policeman (“Why dont you go for the men who began it? My name’s Woolf, and I can take my oath the woman’s not to blame”), “holding his apron and chisel in one hand,” he forgot all about his comical fancy- dress in his anger and his determination to see justice done. (334-35)

“Vanessa. Children. Failure.”: A Sister’s Diary

From the time they were small children, Vanessa and Virginia formed “a very close conspiracy” (MOB 143), one that would survive many disagreements, misunderstandings, and curious infidelities, like Virginia’s flirtation with Clive Bell after

188 the birth of his and Vanessa’s son Julian in 1908. Hermione Lee perceptively calls the relationship between the two sisters “so deep as to be almost indescribable” (116). That they were slightly in awe of each other is obvious: Woolf was admiring of her sister’s artistic output and her domestic arrangements, while Bell always felt herself to be slightly inferior artistically to her more famous sister. Vanessa recalled a particular moment in their childhood which seemed emblematic of the future differences between them:

It was in these two nurseries that we all had whooping cough, for of course there was no question of one alone getting any infectious disease. I believe children on the whole love being ill, but that particular disease did seem to last a very long time. Probably the treatment was completely wrong—anyhow I think we stayed indoors most of the time and had special foods and lots of medicines and in the end emerged four little skeletons and were sent to Bath for a change. The rest of us quickly recovered, but it seemed to me that Virginia was different. She was never again a plump and rosy child and I believe had actually entered into some new layer of consciousness rather abruptly and was suddenly aware of all sorts of questions and possibilities hitherto closed to her. I remember one evening as we were jumping about naked, she and I, in the bathroom. She suddenly asked me which I liked best, my father or mother. Such a question seemed to me rather terrible—surely one ought not to ask it. I felt certain Thoby would have snubbed the questioner. However, being asked, one had to reply and I found I had little doubt as to my answer. “Mother,” I said, and she went on to explain why she, on the whole, preferred father. I don’t think, however, her preference was quite as sure and simple as mine. She had considered both critically and had more or less analysed her feelings for them, which I, at any rate consciously, had never attempted. This seemed to begin an age of much freer speech between us. If one could criticise one’s parents, what or whom could one not criticise? Dimly some freedom of thought and speech seemed born, created by her question. (Bell 59-60)

Quentin Bell likened the two halves of the family to “sense” and “sensibility”: the

Stephens were the cold, literary rationalists, while the Pattles (Julia Stephen’s family) were the artistic, visual, “aesthetic” sensualists (QB1 20). Thus, it is not surprising that

Virginia, who would grow to become a writer and intellectual, should, at a young age, identify with her father, while Vanessa, destined to become a painter, should choose her mother, and the artistic side of the family. This openness and frankness would be a

189 fundamental part of the sisters’ relationship, a relationship which would one of the two or three most important in Virginia Woolf’s life.

One of the central points of comparison between the two sisters was the fact that

Vanessa had children. It seems clear that much of the motivation for Virginia’s flirtation with Clive Bell was their mutual feelings of exclusion from Vanessa’s affections.

Quentin Bell suggests that Clive was unable to deal with “the pissing, puking and slobbering of little children” (QB1 132), and that he escaped from the overheated atmosphere of the house as often as possible, and that Virginia accompanied him. It was on these walks that their intimacy and flirtation deepened; the relationship had another, more platonic and productive aspect—it was here that Woolf began to discuss

Melymbrosia with Clive (see Chapter One). The situation with her brother’s husband highlights one of the central aspect of Woolf’s relationship with her sister: she had often felt mothered by Vanessa, and when an actual baby appeared to “replace” her in her sister’s affections, she retaliated in the only way she knew how. The flirtation would pass, the friendship between the sisters would endure, but the presence of Vanessa’s children (Quentin would be born in 1910, Angelica [by Duncan Grant, not Clive Bell] in

1918) would serve as a constant reminder for Woolf of all that her sister had, and all that she herself lacked.

In 1919, Woolf describes the atmosphere at Charleston, Vanessa Bell’s country retreat in Sussex,6 in an entry that vividly describes the mess and turmoil, but also the

6 There is some uncertainty as to which of the Woolfs made the actual discovery of the farmhouse which would serve as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s country residence for the rest of their lives. Mark Hussey believes that Virginia made the discovery “while walking on the Sussex Downs near the village of Firle” (54), while Rachel Tranter (20) and Kathryn N. Benzel (14) claims that the Woolfs discovered the house together. The video Charleston and Bloomsbury, produced by the Charleston Trust and sold in the Charleston gift shop and played at the house, suggests that Leonard Woolf found the house alone while bicycling over the downs. Woolf herself, in a letter to Vanessa suggesting that she and Duncan and

190 warmth, in Vanessa’s domain:

Charleston is by no means a gentleman’s house. I bicycled round there in a flood of rain, & found the baby asleep in its cot, & Nessa & Duncan sitting over the fire, with bottles & bibs & basins all round them. Duncan went to make my bed. Their staff at this moment consists simply of Jenny, the sharp Jewish looking cook; & she having collapsed, spent the afternoon in bed. By extreme method & unselfishness & routine on Nessa’s & Duncan’s parts chiefly, the dinner is cooked, & innumerable refills of hotwater bottles & baths supplied. One has the feeling of living on the brink of a move. In one of the little islands of comparative order Duncan set up his canvas, & Bunny wrote a novel in a set of copy books. Nessa scarcely leaves the babies room, or if she appears for a moment outside, she has instantly to go off & talk to Dan, Jenny’s young man & the future support of Charleston, or to wash napkins, or bottles, or prepare meals. Mrs B. & the children run rapidly to & fro between their rooms. I had an immense long talk with Ann [Brereton] about the health of the Persian cat, which, according to Mrs B. was fatally injured internally while being washed to cure it of nits; so that she demanded chloroform, which Nessa refused, & the cat recovered. Then Quentin had just been suspected of measles—The atmosphere seems full of catastrophes which upset no one; the atmosphere is good humoured, lively, as it tends to be after three months of domestic disaster. In these circumstances, I daresay I had no more than 30 minutes consecutive talk with Nessa, chiefly devoted to the great epic of the Dr the nurse & Emily. But as happens after disaster upon disaster a sudden lightening of calamity appeared this morning: Dan & his mother being engaged, a letter then arrived from a nurse who against all probability seems to wish to come if she may bring a friend. (D1 249)

Woolf clearly admires her sister’s ability to continue to work and produce in such an environment; while she adored her nephews and niece (and the repeated later testimony of both Quentin and Angelica affirms that they found Virginia a delightful aunt), she also felt quite happy to leave the noise and the mess behind and to return to the peace and quiet of her life with Leonard. One of her complaints about Monks House was that children and barking dogs and the bells of the neighboring church broke her concentration; one wonders how she would have handled the noise and mess of actual children of her own. And yet she has a frequent longing for children in the diary, a longing that is usually connected to Vanessa and her children.

“Bunny” Garnett take that house rather than their brother Adrian and his wife Karin, says merely that “Leonard went over it, and says its a most delightful house and strongly advises you to take it” (L2 95).

191 On 8 June 1911 she writes to Vanessa, describing her deep depression: “I could

not write, and all the devils came out—hairy black ones. To be 29 and unmarried—to be

a failure—childless—insane too, no writer” (L1 466). Some critics have claimed that

once Woolf began publishing books on a regular basis, this became a substitute for

having children, but such a simplistic view ignores the repeated instances throughout the

diary in which she longs for children. She was apparently capable, biologically, of

having them, though she had extremely irregular menstrual periods, owing perhaps to her

periods of mental instability, during which times they usually ceased altogether. Quentin

Bell notes that at the time of her marriage to Leonard, “Virginia was still cheerfully

expecting to have children” (QB2 7). But the decision was, famously, taken out of her

hands.

At the end of January [1913] Virginia and Vanessa were discussing the question of whether Virginia should have children. Leonard talked to Dr (now Sir George) Savage, and Sir George, in his breezy way, had exclaimed that it would do her a world of good; but Leonard mistrusted Sir George; he consulted other people: Maurice Craig, Vanessa’s specialist, T. B. Hyslop and Jean Thomas, who kept a nursing home and knew Virginia well; their views differed but in the end Leonard decided and persuaded Virginia to agree that, although they both wanted children, it would be too dangerous for her to have them. In this I imagine that Leonard was right. It is hard to imagine Virginia as a mother. But it was to be a permanent source of grief to her and, in later years, she could never think of Vanessa’s fruitful state without misery and envy. (QB2 8)

Thus, Vanessa herself is partly complicit in the decision to keep Virginia childless, and while Virginia rarely addresses this fact, it could not have been far from her mind when she observed Vanessa with her own children: her sister and her husband had decided that she should not bear children.

She asks herself directly in September 1919 just how she feels about Vanessa and her family: “Do I envy Nessa her overflowing household? Perhaps at moments. Julian has

192 gone into a preparatory form of breeches; everything flourishing & humane there;

perhaps I can’t help a contrast which never occurs when I’m in full flood of work. I made

these comparisons yesterday, when I lunched there & spent the afternoon & rode home”

(D1 298). She clearly begins to compare her literary output with Vanessa’s biological

output. But such thoughts are never entirely consoling, for is never able to forget that

Vanessa has both physical and artistic offspring—she maintains her work as a painter

while her children crawl beneath her feet. In February 1922, Woolf has an awkward and

painful meeting with Vanessa, in which she again compares herself unfavorably with her

sister:

Nessa came again. How painful these meetings are! Let me try to analyse. Perhaps it is that we both feel that we can exist independently of the other. The door shuts between us, & life flows on again & completely removes the trace. That is an absurd exaggeration. The truth is she was a little depressed, ostensibly because no one had mentioned painting to her in the course of three weeks. “I have seen all the cleverest people, she said, & not one asked me about the South of France. Nobody mentioned painting. I hung two of our latest paintings in Maynard’s room, & he never noticed them.” “Surely Clive?” I said. “Oh Clive knows nothing whatever about it” she replied. All this tends to make her turn to Paris as her dwelling place. But then there are the children, Julian at school, Quentin coming home nightly. And then there is Duncan. “And after all there is nothing binding in our relationship”, she said. “Its quite different from yours.” And so this ruffled me: donkey that I am—am susceptible to the faintest chord of dissonance twelve fields away. I set out to prove that being childless I was less normal than she. She took offence (the words are too strong). Told me I shouldn’t enjoy café life in Paris. Told me I liked my own fireside & books & my friends visits; implied that I was settled & unadventurous. Implied that I spent a great deal upon comfort. As we had only 2 hours together, & she left for Paris next morning, & perhaps I shant see her till May, anyhow not continuously, I felt a sort of discontent, as the door closed behind her. My life, I suppose, did not very vigorously rush in. (D2 159)

Woolf’s attempt to distinguish herself from her sister—by not being “normal” enough to have children—is immediately rebuffed, and Vanessa reasserts her own considerable

193 unconformity. This, for me, is one of the many examples that shatters the myth that

Vanessa Bell was the sensuous earth mother and Virginia Woolf was the frigid snow queen: the irony is that the opposite was somewhat true. While there was certainly a touch of the snob in Virginia (and she acknowledged this, with tongue firmly in cheek, in her essay for the Memoir Club in 1936 entitled “Am I a Snob?”), she was not necessarily the malicious, cruel witch of Bloomsbury legends, and was deeply sensitive and unable to break completely with her Kensington past. It was Vanessa who made a deliberate point of severing all ties with the family after the death of Leslie Stephen, and even pointedly

“cut” her relatives when she saw them on the streets. And when Julian Bell died in 1937 in the Spanish Civil War, Vanessa went into a period of emotional and physical seclusion, and cut herself off from nearly everyone. Woolf, by contrast, could never stand being so isolated.

Not long after the meeting with Vanessa noted above, Woolf gives herself this rather sobering advice in the pages of the diary: “Years & years ago, after the Lytton affair,7 I said to myself, walking up the hill at Beireuth, never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having; good advice I think. At least it often comes back to me.

Never pretend that children, for instance, can be replaced by other things” (D2 221).

When she is in the depths of despair in September 1926, she links her feelings of desolation, in an oft-quoted passage, with her childless state, and with her sister’s apparent domestic bliss:

Oh its beginning its coming—the horror—physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart—tossing me up. I’m unhappy unhappy! Down—God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes; I detect that. Failure failure. (The wave rises).

7 Woolf refers here to her engagement to Lytton Strachey in February 1909, which lasted less than a day. Such a marriage would obviously have been disastrous for both.

194 Oh they laughed at my taste in green paint! Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I’ve only a few years to live I hope. I cant face this horror any more—(this is the wave spreading out over me). (D3 110)

It is clear that whatever success she has attained—and by 1926 she was well-regarded as a writer, though the years of true fame were still in the future—is no match for her feelings of failure as both an artist and a woman. One of the most striking features of

Woolf’s thoughts on children is that she believed that had she had more self-control, she would have been allowed to have them: “Charleston & Tilton knocked me off my perch for a moment: Nessa & her children: Maynard & his carpets. My own gifts & shares seemed so moderate in comparison; my own fault too—a little more self control on my part, & we might have had a boy of 12, a girl of 10: This always rakes me wretched in the early hours” (D3 107). Thus, she consistently blames herself for a decision that had largely been made without her consent. Part of this rage against the advice of doctors would find its way into Mrs. Dalloway—where there she is mainly referring to her outrage over their consistent misdiagnosis of mental illnesses, some of her feelings of being told whether or not she should bear children must have come into play.

And yet by 1927, when she is in the thick of writing Orlando (and, tellingly, after she has had a relationship with Vita Sackville-West), she has changed her mind, to a degree, about the prospect of children. This could be due partly to advancing age, but largely seems to be a genuine shift in thinking. One thing has, somehow, replaced the other:

This flashed to my mind at Nessa’s children’s party last night. The little creatures acting moved my infinitely sentimental throat. Angelica so mature, & composed; all grey & silver; such an epitome of all womanliness; & such an unopened bud of sense & sensibility; wearing a grey wig & a sea coloured dress. And yet oddly enough I scarcely want children of my own now. This insatiable desire to write something before I die, this ravaging sense of the shortness &

195 feverishness of life, make me cling, like a man on a rock, to my one anchor. I don’t like the physicalness of having children of one’s own. This occurred to me at Rodmell; but I never wrote it down. I can dramatise myself as parent, it is true. And perhaps I have killed the feeling instinctively; as perhaps nature does. (D3 167)

The shift in this entry is remarkable, for it finds Woolf in an apparent state of equanimity, and it reveals that while she enjoys the children’s company, she is well aware that her

“anchor” is her own work, her need to write good books.

But envy of Vanessa and her life returns in January 1931, when “We went over to

Charleston yesterday, & I fought, rather successfully with the usual depression. Is it their levity?—a sneer? But nothing so bad as usual. Duncan there. We came in, & the scene had the usual red cave effect—red cave in the profound winter hollow” (D4 3). While she does not specifically mention the children in the entry, it is safe to assume that her feelings of inferiority, of being mocked, stem from her perception of Vanessa’s fecundity, and her own childless state. By 1937, she is beginning to enter menopause, and children, so long delayed, are now an impossibility. Again, the thoughts of being childless lead her to think immediately of Vanessa:

I wish I could write out my sensations at this moment. They are so peculiar & so unpleasant. Partly T[ime] of L[ife]? I wonder. A physical feeling as if I were drumming slightly in the veins: very cold: impotent: & terrified. As if I were exposed on a high ledge in full light. Very lonely. L. out to lunch. Nessa has Quentin& dont want me. Very useless. No atmosphere round me. No words. Very apprehensive. As if something cold & horrible—a roar of laughter at my expense were about to happen. And I am powerless to ward it off: I have no protection. (D5 63)

On the surface, Woolf appeared content to be Aunt Virginia, and the children clearly delighted in her company, as did Nigel and Ben Nicolson, the sons of Vita Sackville-

West; Nigel once claimed in an interview that when Vita announced that Virginia was coming to stay at Long Barn, the Nicolsons’ house in Kent near Knole, the boy’s

196 response was always, “Oh, good!” (“Mind and Times”). Nicolson has also described

Woolf’s tendency to ask the children extremely detailed questions about their days; she was, he believed, “gathering copy” (“Mind and Times”) for those descriptions of children in novels such as To the Lighthouse. And when she returned home, to her quiet life with

Leonard, she had her diary to confide to about the mixture of envy, resentment, and admiration she felt for her sister, just a few miles distant in Sussex, living a life so different from her own.

“She may have her eye on me”: Vita and Virginia

Judy Simons has called Virginia Woolf’s diary a “safety curtain,” a document behind which Woolf is able to hide to avoid writing the truth about her life while appearing to do exactly that; she goes so far as to claim, “Virginia Woolf was a woman who appeared to put all of her energies into self-expression, yet who never told the truth about herself” (169). This somewhat surprising assertion is an interesting thought to hold while examining the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, for it is one of the rare occasions in Woolf’s life when we have two rather conflicting accounts of the same series of events: an examination of the letters between Vita and Virginia and

Woolf’s own account of the relationship in the diary raises interesting questions about emotional truth and emotional performance. Which more accurate represents Virginia

Woolf’s true feelings about Vita: the wild and effusive letters, or the more equivocal version in the diary?

As noted in Chapter Two, Sackville-West first appears in Woolf’s diary when she praises Woolf’s work. They meet on 15 December 1922:

I am too muzzy headed to make out anything. This is partly the result of dining to meet the lovely gifted aristocratic Sackville West last night at Clive’s. Not much

197 to my severer taste—florid, moustached, parakeet coloured, with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist. She writes 15 pages a day— has finished another book—publishes with Heinemanns—knows everyone— But could I ever know her? I am to dine there on Tuesday. […] The aristocratic manner is something like the actresses—no false shyness or modesty: a bead dropped into her plate at dinner—given to Clive—asks for liqueur—has her hand on all the ropes—makes me feel virgin, shy, & schoolgirlish. Yet after dinner I rapped out opinions. She is a grenadier; hard; handsome, manly; inclined to double chin. (D2 216-17)

Hardly the description written by someone about to fall madly and instantly in love. The most telling remarks are Woolf’s question, “But could I ever know her?” and her assertion that she feels “virginal” in Vita’s presence. The latter would retrospectively set the parameters of their relationship: Vita as impulsive, masculine, oversexed, Virginia as shy, quiet, virginal, “schoolgirlish.” But as Hermione Lee notes, examination of the evidence shows the relationship developing in somewhat different form from the accepted story—a story that Vita herself helped to perpetuate (497). In the entry above,

Woolf already senses the impossibility of knowing someone with such a flashy and tempestuous life—her scandalous affair with Violet Trefusis was fairly common knowledge by this point, at least in Woolf’s set. When the Nicolsons visit in February

1923, Woolf acknowledges this: “She is a pronounced Sapphist, & may, thinks Ethel

Sands, have an eye on me, old though I am. Nature might have sharpened her faculties.

Snob as I am, I trace her passions 500 years back, & they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine. I fancy the tang is gone” (D2 235-36). The entry is fascinating for its slight self-mockery (“old though I am”) and for the sense of apprehension that Vita may have designs on her. In hindsight, it is also remarkable that Woolf immediately recognizes Sackville-West as an old soul, and in her imagining of Vita’s past loves, she gives herself the précis for Orlando.

198 By the summer of 1924, Woolf is beginning in her diary to appraise Vita as something more than a friend. After a visit to Knole, where she is impressed by the centuries of Sackville relics, she observes, “All these ancestors & centuries, & silver & gold, have bred a perfect body. She is stag like, or race horse like, save for the face, which pouts, & has no very sharp brain. But as a body hers is perfection. So many rare & curious objects hit one’s brain like pellets which perhaps may unfold later” (D2 306).

This may be the first instance in the diary where Woolf describes another person’s body with anything like desire; at the same time, the entry is a typical description of Vita, in that while Woolf often lavishes her with a certain kind of praise—usually physical, but sometimes literary, or in admiration of Vita’s social ease and sophistication or her noble ancestry—it is nearly always undercut by some criticism, something that renders the overall effect somewhat ambivalent. This is in contrast to the letters to Vita herself. In the letter thanking Vita for the above visit, she writes, “But I have only to say that I was enchanted and made envious by my visit—and what hostess can do more?” (L3 118).

Mark Hussey argues that Woolf “seduced” Vita in December 1925 at Long Barn, just before Vita was set to leave England with Harold Nicolson for an extended stay in

Persia (247); Hermione Lee’s account is somewhat more skeptical, and does not lay the

“seduction” squarely at either Virginia or Vita’s feet:

Vita picked Virginia up from London in her car […]. They drove to Long Barn and spent two days and nights alone. The first evening was “peaceful,” according to Vita’s diary. Late that night she wrote reassuringly to Harold saying that she was not going to fall in love with Virginia, nor Virginia with her (nor, for that matter, she with Leonard, or Leonard with her). The second day was spent shopping in Sevenoaks (where Virginia had her vision of Vita in the fishmonger’s). Vita added to her letter to Harold that Virginia liked The Land, and liked Vita. “She said she depends on me. She is so vulnerable under all her brilliance. I do love her, but not b.s.ly.” (This was the code which Harold and Vita used for homosexual love: it stood for “back-stairs-ly.”) But the second

199 night was “not peaceful”; they stayed up until 3 a.m., talking, intimate, amorous. The next day Vita added yet more to her letter to Harold: how “mentally exciting” Virginia was, how their friendship was advancing “by leaps and bounds”: “I love her, but couldnt fall in love with her, so don’t be nervous!” (These protestations aroused Harold’s anxieties. He replied from Tehran that he thought Virginia and Vita should be good for each other, but that she had not got “la main heureuse” with married couples.) Leonard arrived, and Vita drove them both back to London on the Sunday, leaving Tavistock Square without being offered any lunch (an omission which made Virginia wake up trembling with shame in the night). Virginia’s afterword to her diary, on Vita’s Sapphic amorosity and full- breastedness and maternal affection, was full of reservations: “How much shall I really miss her?” In retrospect, as the weekend became mythologised, they would joke to each other about Virginia’s bad behaviour on the sofa, how she had “snared” and “surprised” Vita that night. It seems that Virginia was as seductive as she was seduced. She was the one who was teasing and flirting, her sensuality and her will as much in play as Vita’s. (492-93)

Woolf’s account of her visit with Vita is worth examining in full:

But no Vita! But Vita for 3 days at Long Barn, from which L. & I returned yesterday. These Sapphists love women; friendship is never untinged with amorosity. In short, my fears & refrainings, my ‘impertinence’ my usual self- consciousness in intercourse with people who mayn’t want me & so on—were all, as L. said, sheer fudge; &, partly thanks to him (he made me write) I wound up this wounded & stricken year in great style. I like her & being with her, & the splendour—she shines in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks with a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung. That is the secret of her glamour, I suppose. Anyhow she found me incredibly dowdy, no woman cared less for personal appearance—no one put on things in the way I did. Yet so beautiful, &c. What is the effect of all this on me? Very mixed. There is her maturity & full breastedness: her being so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood (but she is a little cold & offhand with her boys) her being in short (what I have never been) a real woman. Then there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe; & not reflective. No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, & so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone. What L. gives me, & Nessa gives me, & Vita, in her more clumsy external way, tries to give me. For of course, mingled with all this glamour, grape clusters & pearl necklaces, there is something loose fitting. How much, for example, shall I really miss her when she is motoring across the desert? I will make a note on that next year. Anyhow, I am very glad that she is coming to tea today, & I shall ask her, whether she minds my dressing so badly? I think she does. I read her poem; which is more compact, better seen & felt than anything yet of hers. (D3 51-52)

200 Lee notes that this entry ends with a “tantalizing” sentence: “We go down to Charleston

tomorrow, not without some trepidation on my part, partly because I shall be hung about

with trailing clouds of glory from Long Barn wh. always disorientates me & makes me

more than usually nervous: then I am—altogether so queer in some ways. One emotion

succeeds another” (D3 52-53). Lee observes that “Queer was certainly a known code word for homosexuality by the 1930s” (487). And yet Woolf was always adamant that she herself was not a “Sapphist”—“These Sapphists love women” implies a category from which she excludes herself, and when she publishes A Room of One’s Own in 1929 she fears that she will be “hinted at for a sapphist” (D3 262). The above entry is remarkable as well for the very restrained and subdued tone—again, this is not the entry of a woman who has just spent a rapturous, passionate weekend with a woman she loves.

But the day after the entry, she writes to Vita, beginning the letter with a laugh: “My dear

Mrs Nicolson—ah hah!” She continues, flirtatiously:

I am dashing off to buy, a pair of gloves. I am sitting up in bed: I am very very charming; and Vita is a dear old rough coated sheep dog: or alternatively, hung with grapes, pink with pearls, lustrous, candle lit, in the door of a Sevenoaks draper. I’ll ask Nessa whether Saturday or Sunday [at Charleston] and write to Knole. But do not snuff the stinking tallow out of your heart—poor Virginia to wit, and Dog Grizzle (who is scratching under my bed) Now for a Bus down Southampton Row. (L3 224)

(Is it significant that Woolf almost immediately reports being ill with flu in the week after her return from Long Barn? Many scholars and psychologists have argued that Woolf’s physical illnesses were partly psychosomatic; it would follow that this illness may have been brought on by the events of that visit to Vita.) It is interesting that Woolf uses much of the same imagery in both the diary’s and the letter’s account of the weekend—Vita looking lustrous, hung with grapes, etc.—but that in the letter, the tone is more effusive,

201 more flattering, while the diary is more guarded. It is possible that the guarded tone is for

Leonard’s benefit. The parenthetical “he made me write” is suggestive. Was Leonard

Woolf reading Woolf’s diary at this time for clues as to how far the relationship with Vita had progressed, and was she censoring her true feelings in order to spare his? An idea of

Vita’s may support this: Hermione Lee notes that it “became awkward for Virginia to be getting so many love-letters from Vita, so Vita concealed them inside letters that could be read by Leonard—a strategy for which Virginia half-mocked her friend: ‘You are a miracle of discretion—one letter in another. I never thought of that.’” (497-98). It seems clear that Vita perceived Leonard’s annoyance and trepidation; if Vita was aware of it,

Woolf surely was as well. Could then her diary be a compromised account of the affair?

The documentary The War Within: A Portrait of Virginia Woolf reveals the contents of four letters from Virginia Woolf kept by Vita Sackville-West in her desk drawer in the tower at Sissinghurst; even Nigel Nicolson, her son and the editor of

Woolf’s letters, did not know they were there. One, dated 1932, long after their affair had ended, contains, “& when am I going to see you because you know you love now several people, women, I mean physically, I mean better, more carnally, than me,” and concludes, “I am very jealous of all your new loves” (War Within). Throughout 1932, her diary entries on Vita are affectionate, but display little jealousy or sexual interest. It is conceivable that Woolf censored her feelings for Vita, out of respect for Leonard, or even out of a fear of confronting such impulses on the page. The relationship was thus largely a conspiracy of two, conducted most passionately by mail.

202 Conclusion

As I continue to develop and expand this project, I intend to pursue several other avenues for research in the diary of Virginia Woolf which have been beyond the scope of this comparatively brief study. Perhaps the most illuminating and rewarding aspect of this project for me—apart from the pleasure of Woolf’s company in the pages of the diary—has been the revelation of all that a diary can be: writing tool, confidante, therapist, historical record, room of one’s own. Woolf’s ability to turn her diary into the fluid document with which she lived most of her life has been an inspiration to me in my own diary-writing, and has encouraged me to experiment, to try new forms, to allow the diary to become something larger than the standard cataloguing of events so often encouraged by those little books with locks and keys. As this work continues, the following “lenses” should also prove revelatory.

Virginia Woolf’s diary records the fascinating development of her personal political thought. In the early days of the main series, Woolf tends to defere to Leonard politically, and, as has been seen, regards his activity with the Fabian Socialists with some slight skepticism, largely due to her discomfort with Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

Nevertheless, on 23 January 1915, she “declare[s] myself a Fabian” (D1 26), and from this point, the diary begins to chart Woolf’s slow political awakening, from her early days working with Leonard and the Women’s Co-operative Guild, through the drafting of the document which would help in the formation of the League of Nations, through the first glimmerings of her own personal feminism, particularly during the composition of A

Room of One’s Own, and the development of her anti-fascist thought during the Second

World War and the composition of Three Guineas. The diary shows her slow growth

203 from a woman who was fairly apolitical and concerned mainly with art, to an artist who realizes that art and politics are inextricably linked, that committing art is a political act.

Woolf’s famous assertion that “as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world” (Three Guineas 166) is perhaps the best illustration of her belief in the concept of the outsider—that the outsider, the one who is not privy to the perks and bonuses of patriarchal, hierarchal society, is the stronger, for only she—and in Woolf’s thinking the outsider usually is female—can point out the flaws, holes, and cracks in the system to which those on the inside are blind.

Again, this development is quite slow and gradual, and can be traced in the pages of the diary.

Few writers have expressed the sheer joy of living in the city of London as well as

Virginia Woolf. The diary’s pages are filled with “the tumult & riot & busyness of it all”

(D1 9)—the shops (and the shop girls), the sandwich men, the old ladies selling flowers, the parks, the roar of the traffic, the possibility of running into an old friend on the street, the slice of sky overhead—the exuberance that is caught so well in the pages of Mrs.

Dalloway also appears in the diary, but put into even greater relief by its sharp contrast to the countryside, and to her descriptions of her travels. The diary of Virginia Woolf is also very much a diary of place: not just London and the country, but the specific homes in which she and her friends and relatives live. Woolf is adept at describing landscapes and rooms, exteriors and interiors. It is possible to see the diary as not only a record of where she was on a certain date, but how those places were when she was in them, and how the environment affects her mood, her temperament, her psyche. Linked with this is the idea that Woolf’s diary is also a diary of Bloomsbury, not only the place but of the

204 legendary Group. She uses the diary as a place to record the talk of her brilliant friends, to chart their comings and goings, their love affairs, their gossip. The diary is thus also a historical record of a literary and artistic coterie, in which we can see the ebb and flow of friendships, rivalries, and the artists’ work over decades.

The famous issue of Woolf’s sexual abuse has tended to overshadow much criticism and has seeped into the culture at large; Hermione Lee even begins her biography by claiming that one of the four questions she was most often asked when telling people about her project was, “Is it true that she was sexually abused as a child?”

(3). Woolf does not often write directly about her mental illness in the diary, and thus it is difficult to get a clear picture of its characteristics from its pages. It is one of the striking features of that illness that its symptoms were never entirely mental: she suffered headaches, fatigue, backaches, racing pulse, digestive problems, sleep disturbances. The mind/body link has been at the core of attempts to define Woolf’s illness, as to whether it has biological or psychological roots, or both. It will be fascinating to examine the ways in which Woolf occasionally uses her diary as the locus for evaluating her illness, dismissing it, bemoaning it, coming to shaky terms with it, dreading its next appearance.

The links between Woolf’s diary and her body are further complicated however by the fact that very often, when she was ill, she was restricted from writing, either by Leonard or her doctors. The whole year 1916 is absent from the diary, thanks to her devastating breakdown in March 1915. One wonders what sort of diary entries she might have produced in her moments of lucidity during that period, had she been allowed to do so.

Would she have written about her illness, or attempted instead to work on her professional writing, which also suffered during this time? Suzette A. Henke’s Shattered

205 Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing is essential for this discussion, given the links that she establishes between traumatic events and women writers’ ability to heal traumatic wounds in what Henke calls “scriptotherapy—the process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic reenactment” (xii). I would suggest that the very thing that Woolf was denied by her well-meaning husband and doctors—to take up her pen and write—was exactly the thing that may have contributed to her recovery, not to her continued illness. The problems she was experiencing, if we assume that they were based on some kind of trauma, would perhaps have been alleviated in being siphoned off onto the page.

Podnieks notes that Woolf produced in the documentation of her life a text that is at once a diary and yet refuses “to be pinned down as such” (358). It is my hope that scholars will continue to study the diary of Virginia Woolf as the multifaceted and various work that it is, and will come to see it as one of Woolf’s most essential texts.

206 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, M. H., gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Volume One. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 1993.

Alpers, Anthony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. New York: Penguin, 1982.

Abbott, H. Porter. “Old Virginia and the Night Writer: The Origins of Woolf’s Narrative Meander.” Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries. Ed. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1996. 236-251.

Bell, Anne Olivier. Editing Virginia Woolf’s Diary. London: The Bloomsbury Workshop, 1990.

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. 2 vols. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1972.

Bell, Vanessa. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. Ed. Regina Marler. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

---. Sketches in Pen and Ink. Ed. Lia Giachero. London: Hogarth Press, 1997.

Benzel, Kathryn N. Charleston: A Voice in the House. London: Cecil Woolf, 1998.

Blodgett, Harriet. Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U P, 1988.

Bloom, Lynn Z. “ ‘I Write for Myself and Strangers’: Private Diaries as Public Documents.” Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries. Ed. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1996. 23-37.

Briggs, Julia. Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2006.

---. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. New York: Harcourt, 2005.

Broun, Heywood Hale. Interview with Nigel Nicolson. Literary Guild First Edition Series audiocassette. n.d.

Charleston and Bloomsbury. Dir. Jamie Muir. Prod. Uden Associates. Videocassette. 1995.

Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998.

207

---. Introduction. The Voyage Out. By Virginia Woolf. New York: Modern Library, 2000. ix-xliv.

Curtis, Vanessa. “The Ciphers in A Passionate Apprentice.” Virginia Woolf Bulletin of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain 17 (Sept. 2004): 53-54.

DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. Boston: Beacon P, 1989.

---. Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making. New York: Macmillan, 1980.

Hankin, Cherry A., ed. Letters Between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murray. New York: New Amsterdam, 1988.

Henke, Suzette A. “ ‘The Prime Minister’: A Key to Mrs. Dalloway.” Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays. Ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg and Laura Moss Gottlieb. Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing Company, 1983. 127-141.

---. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1998.

Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf A—Z. New York: Oxford U P, 1995.

Johnson, Alexandra. The Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Creative Life. New York: Anchor, 1997.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Lehmann, John. Thrown to the Woolfs. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978.

Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. London: Michael Joseph, 1962.

Levin, Gerald. “The Musical Style of The Waves.” Journal of Narrative Technique 13, 3 (1983): 164-71.

Lounsberry, Barbara. “Virginia Woolf and the Community of Diarists.” Virginia Woolf and Communities: Selected Papers from the Eighth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jeanette McVicker and Laura Davis. New York: Pace U P, 1999. 202-211.

Lowe, Gill, ed. Hyde Park Gate News: The Stephen Family Newspaper: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, with Thoby Stephen. London: Hesperus P, 2005.

208

Mallon, Thomas. A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984.

Marler, Regina. Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.

Martinson, Deborah. In the Presence of Audience: The Self in Diaries and Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State U P, 2003.

“The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf.” Dir. Tony Steyger. Perf. Hermione Lee, Frances Spalding, Nigel Nicolson, Alistair Upton, and Olivier Bell. The Hours. DVD. Paramount, 2003.

Moffat, Mary Jane and Charlotte Painter, eds. Revelations: Diaries of Women. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Nicolson, Nigel. Portrait of a Marriage. New York: Atheneum, 1973.

Podnieks, Elizabeth. Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s U P, 2000.

Rainer, Tristine. The New Diary. Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1978.

Raitt, Suzanne. Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. New York: Oxford U P, 1993.

Rhein, Donna. The Handprinted Books of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1917-1932. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985.

Rogat, Ellen Hawkes. “The Virgin in the Bell Biography.” Twentieth Century Literature 20, 2 (April 1974): 96-113.

Schiff, James A. “An Interview with Michael Cunningham,” Missouri Review 26.2 (Fall 2003): 111-27.

Silver, Brenda R. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

---. Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1983.

Simons, Judy. Diaries and Journals of Literary Women from Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf. London: Macmillan, 1990.

Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1987.

209 Tranter, Rachel. Vanessa Bell: A Life of Painting. London: Cecil Woolf, 1998.

The War Within: A Portrait of Virginia Woolf. Dir. John Fuegi. Perf. Nigel Nicolson, Hermione Lee, Jane Marcus. Videocassette. Arthur Cantor Films, 1995.

Whitworth, Michael H. Virginia Woolf. New York: Oxford U P, 2005.

---. “Virginia Woolf and Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2000.

Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989.

Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Virginia Woolf and Anti-Semitism. London: Cecil Woolf, 1995.

Woolf, Leonard. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939. San Diego: Harvest, 1967.

---. Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904 to 1911. San Diego: Harvest, 1961.

Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969 (1941).

---. The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays. New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950.

---. Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches. Ed. David Bradshaw. London: Hesperus Press, 2002.

---. Collected Essays. 4 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.

---. The Common Reader. First Series, annotated edition. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace & Company, 1984 (1925).

---. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Susan Dick. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

---. Congenial Spirits. The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Joanne Trautmann Banks. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. (Vols. 2-5 assisted by Andrew McNeillie). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984.

---. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. 6 vols. Vol. 1: 1904- 1912; Vol. 2: 1912-1918; Vol. 3: 1919-1924. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986 (v. 1), 1987 (v. 2), 1988 (v. 3).

210 ---. Flush, A Biography. New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1961 (1933).

---. Jacob's Room. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950 (1922).

---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-1980.

---. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953 (1925).

---. Mrs. Dalloway’s Party: A Short Story Sequence. Edited by Stella McNichol. New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

---. Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. Second edition. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

---. Night and Day. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948 (1920).

---. Orlando: A Biography. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956 (1928).

---. The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years. Edited by Mitchell A. Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

---. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals. 1897-1909. Edited by Mitchell A. Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

---. Pointz Hall. The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts. Edited by Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: University Publications, 1983.

---. Roger Fry, A Biography. New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976 (1940).

---. A Room of One’s Own. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989 (1929).

---. The Second Common Reader. Annotated edition. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986 (1932).

---. Three Guineas. New York: Harbinger/Harcourt, Brace & World, 1938.

---. To the Lighthouse. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989 (1927).

---. To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft. Transcribed and edited by Susan Dick. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982.

---. The Voyage Out. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948 (1920).

211 ---. The Waves. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978 (1931).

---. The Waves. The Two Holograph Drafts. Transcribed and edited by J. W. Graham. London: Hogarth Press, 1976.

---. A Writer’s Diary. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.

---. The Years. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965 (1937).

Wussow, Helen M., ed. Virginia Woolf “The Hours”: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Pace U P, 1997.

212