Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read

4. Professional Writer

4 Professional Writer Virginia Woolf’s 1904–1905 Diary “my work gets established” (February 8, 1905; PA 234) R ed-letter dates color the 1904–5 diary. That is, Virginia Stephen stamps or writes the dates in red ink, then shifts to black ink for the entry proper. Like her last (1903) journal, this 1904–5 diary is self-bound with a gray paper cover. However, it is much smaller than the 1903 diary: only four-and-a-half inches wide and five-and-three-quarter inches long (rather than six-and-onequarter inches wide and eight-and-seven-eighth inches long). Leslie Stephen succumbed to abdominal cancer on February 22, 1904. On May 10, twenty-two-year-old Virginia—bereft now of father, mother, and work—suffers a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide. While convalescing in Cambridge with her aunt Caroline Stephen, she finds in October a “hoard” of her aunt’s diaries and those of her paternal grandmother, Jane Catherine Venn (L #185, 1: 146). Her grandmother’s diaries were “most amusing and interesting ,” she writes to Violet Dickinson. “She kept records of all her children saidanddidfromthetimetheywereborntill1873.Someofthechildsayingsare quite delightful, and extraordinarily characteristic of him [her father] as a man, and of the Quaker [Caroline Stephen], who always makes haste to agree and to offer Lellie [Leslie] her best toy when he has broken his!” (L #185, 1: 146). As with her 1899 Warboys journal, reading others’ diaries may have ignited the diary flame. A further note-worthy event occurs in December 1904 as well: the publication of her first professional work in The Guardian, an Anglo-Catholic clerical journal with a women’s supplement, edited by Violet Dickinson’s friend Margaret Lyttelton. 76 Becoming Virginia Woolf Like her first diary at age fourteen, the diary Woolf maintains from “Christmas 1904” to May 31, 1905, is an almost daily diary accented with dashes and showing the diarist’s deep private interest in history as she records the public comings and goings of the Stephen children now “four square” against the world (PA 244). This diary ranks third in number of entries in Woolf’s diaries, its 135 entries trailing only the 309 entries in her first diary and the 143 entries in her1917–18AshehamHousenaturalhistorydiary.Thediarydocuments,almost to the exclusion of all else, her emergence as a professional writer.1 While this diary harkens back in noteworthy ways to Virginia’s first extant diary , its first four entries reprise themes of her 1899 and 1903 diaries. Like the 1899 Warboys diary, the 1904–5 diary comes to life in the country—at New Forest during the Christmas 1904 holidays. Virginia’s opening entry also calls to mind her 1903 Stonehenge entries. “The trees stand round in a circle,” she writes; “far away voices of men shouting, all sound as in some distant romantic dream; as though falling through an ocean of waters” (PA 215). Male voices distant, the writer’s voice can sound. Her first two entries show her still drawn to changing light and recall her 1899 Warboys “Chapter on Sunsets.” “The sunset makes all the air as though of melted amethyst; yellow flakes dissolve from the solid body of amethyst which is the west,” she writes on Christmas 1904 (PA 215). “The afternoon was a beautiful specimen of winter light,” she states again in her next entry, January 1, 1905; “the air as clear as though sheets of glass had been dissolved into atmosphere & all the colours were lively & delicate” (PA 216). But she must leave the country on January 4. Her January 5 entry compares the country to London to the latter’s disadvantage: “A London day. That is to say only narrow strip of sky to be looked at, no bird noises, no sighings & moanings of trees & green growing things—no splash of water—only the interminableroar &rattle&confusionofwheels&voices”(PA217).However,thenew professional writer makes the best of it. “But ones mind ‘grows mouldy in the country,’” she writes, quoting I know not who (PA 217). However, on March 19 Virginia takes Vanessa on a bus ride “to the top of the Steep Hampstead Rd. & then on to the edge of the Heath, from which we looked miles into a land of green fields, blue distance, & cloudy trees. This did refresh our eyes; & birds sang here as in the country, & it was pitiable to have to turn our backs on such beauty; & descend again into the black pit of London—but we had to” (PA 254). On May 7 she takes...