Woolf’s Diaries & Those She Read

THE IDEA for Barbara Lounsberry’s Becoming Virginia Woolf is straightforward but exciting: discuss Woolf’s diaries in the context of the diaries she read. As a nineteenth-century specialist who appreciates and teaches Woolf regularly as part of a broader interest in the development of the English novel, I was particularly interested to learn about Woolf’s reading of the diaries of Fanny Burney, Mary Coleridge, Samuel Pepys, Walter Scott, and other important writers. And Lounsberry delivers on her promise to interpret Woolf’s early diaries via this context—from the small 1897 diary she began keeping at age fourteen to the 1918 Hogarth House diary she completed in her mid-30s. She discusses the influence of these diarists thoroughly, with emphasis on how they offered Woolf meaningful purposes for her diaries: to preserve family histories, provide personal catharsis, and, perhaps most important, develop distinct writing methods. Each of the seven chapters moves between sections about Woolf’s diaries themselves (in which Lounsberry analyzes the important themes found in each of the twelve diaries Woolf produced before mid-1918) and sections about diaries by other writers. Still, these differently focused sections in each chapter speak to each other through Lounsberry’s narrative about Woolf as a diarist: she is first an “experimenter” (chapters 1 and 2), then someone who chooses an “outsider role” (chapter 3), and finally a “professional writer” (chapter 4), who both “embraces the unconscious” in her overall aesthetic (chapter 5) and works out the “problem of description” (chapter 6) as she develops her own writerly methods.

In building a narrative about Woolf’s development as a diarist, Lounsberry responds to the diverse critical approaches to Woolf’s work, which often do not agree in their interpretations of key moments in Woolf’s writing. For example, in chapter 2, when discussing Woolf’s experimentation as a seventeen-year-old in her 1899 Warboys Diary, Lounsberry responds to the frustration of nephew and biographer Quentin Bell and editor of the early diaries Mitchell Leaska over this experimentation, as well as Louise DeSalvo’s psychoanalytical discussion of Woolf’s characterization of her cousin Gerald Duckworth, who is thought to have sexually abused Woolf in their teenage years. In response to Bell and Leaska, who characterize the 1899 diary as “exasperating” and having the “appearance of immense chaos” respectively, Lounsberry argues that “what may first appear to be fussy adolescent pen and penmanship play also marks the young writer’s growing sense of audience and concern for writing standards.” Lounsberry then goes on to detail how Woolf attempts “nature writing,” a form of writing that runs through the early diaries, but has a hard time achieving what she wants in this form; Lounsberry also shows how Woolf works at description, a technique that will be perfected over the course of the early diaries, but feels as though she fails in this technique at this early stage of her writing. In response to DeSalvo’s argument that Woolf’s persona “Miss Jan” in the 1899 diary articulates feelings Woolf could not directly state and that her diary entry titled “Extract from the Hunting-donshire Gazette. TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN A DUCKPOND” is a “covert communication of her sexual abuse” from Duckworth, Lounsberry offers alternate readings that emphasize Woolf’s experimentation with writerly methods. For Lounsberry, “Miss Jan” is better explained as a “family nickname” Woolf uses in several different contexts, including but not limited to a method for telling Duckworth to examine his own actions, some of which disrupt Woolf’s progress as a writer. Likewise, “TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN A DUCKPOND” needs to be considered in various contexts, including Woolf’s experimentation with “journalistic conventions” and “gothic narratives,” especially as “parody” of these genres.

As Lounsberry moves into Woolf’s adoption of the outsider role in chapter 3 and her status as professional writer whose aesthetic is shaped by embrace of the unconscious and subtle description in chapters 4, 5, and 6, Lounsberry adeptly discusses Woolf’s...