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

6. THE PROBLEM OF DESCRIPTION

6 The Problem of Description T he many paths to apt description occupy Virginia Woolf’s mind across her seventh and eighth diary books. Her first task in her 1906 to 1909 Continental travel diary is to skirt the trap of guidebook prose during her trip to Greece and Turkey. In Constantinople she works hard to rid herself of Western notions of the East. Her problems intensify, however, with her 1908 and 1909 Italian travels. “I begin to distrust description,” she writes in 1908 as she seeks to expand her diary (and other) art (PA 384). She wants to write now “not only with the eye, but with the mind; & discover real things beneath the show” (PA 384). In 1909 Florence she begins to seek less definition and more subtlety in her descriptions. She first fears “empty & ladylike writing” and then rejects it, choosing to be a blazing furnace instead (PA 395). In her newly found 1909 life diary, she tries out a new kind of description, one in which place and portrait join: décor disclosing character. We leave her in this 1909 diary pressing for finer and finer discriminations. The diaries she reads from 1908 to 1910 become part of her steady march toward a view, voice, and form of her own. Of Lady Elizabeth Holland, whose Journal she reviews in 1908, Woolf exclaims admiringly: “But what numbers of likenesses she struck off, and with what assurance!” (E 1: 237). Lady Holland and Lady Hester Stanhope, whose exploits Woolf follows gleefully across six diary volumes, are women who boldly break conventions. In 1910 Woolf reads diary extracts of a more recent foremother, those in Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great-great niece. Mary Coleridge forged the path Woolf is following in 1910. Coleridge writes in multiple forms, savors fantasy, relishes change, and deplores women’s depiction in literature. In contrast, in a 1910 review, Woolf defines herself against Ralph Waldo Emerson and his early journals. She rejects as “platitudes” the American’s simple 122 Becoming Virginia Woolf thoughts (each a match to a single idea in his mind), just as she rejected the simple static beauty of Perugino’s fresco in Italy in 1908. She wants instead complexity , multiplicity, suggestive discords, and movement: the flight of the mind. Virginia Woolf’s 1906–1909 Continental Travel Diary “And is it not to study sides of all things that we travel?” (October 1906; PA 338) The productive summer sojourn at Norfolk’s Blo’ Norton manor had barely ended in 1906 when Virginia departed in September with Vanessa and Violet Dickinson for nearly two months’ travel in Greece and Turkey. Rather than record her Continental travels in her travel diary in progress, Virginia chose to begin a new diary book, one slightly longer and thinner than the Great Britain travel diary with cream unruled paper instead of white. Perhaps she wished a new book for her lengthy travel—or did she see her Continental forays as something apart? The latter gains weight from the fact that when she journeys to the New Forest at Christmas 1906, after her return from Greece and Turkey in November, she takes her brown-covered Great Britain travel diary from her shelf; she does not simply continue in her last diary, the Continental diary. Her seventh diary book, the Continental travel diary of 1906 to 1909, preserves her explorations of Greece and Constantinople in 1906 and her travels in Italy in 1908 and 1909.  The Greek tour begins auspiciously enough on Thoby Stephen’s twenty-sixth birthday, September 8, 1906. Virginia has been studying Greek and the Greeks for almost a decade. Her eagerness for Greece can be gauged from the fact that she passes completely over her first six days of travel in France and Italy to begin the diary with their reunion with Thoby and Adrian in Olympia, Greece. In fact, her first diary heading exclaims “Olympia. September 14th!” Twentyfour entries convey her thirty-seven-day Greek holiday. The first seventeen entries are titled: fifteen with the names of places she visits (including four on the Acropolis) and two with subject headings (“Germans and Modern Athens” and “Modern Greeks”). The diary’s final seven entries bear no dates or titles at all, a return to the unmarked form of the previous Blo’ Norton, Giggleswick, and Cornwall diaries. Woolf’s drive to avoid guidebook prose becomes the recurring theme of [3.145.152.98] Project MUSE (2024...