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

7. THE DIARY COALESCES

7 The Diary Coalesces “T o coalesce” means to grow together or fuse. This happens to Woolf’s diary from 1915 to 1918. In 1915, the now married diarist blends place and portrait, event and thought, into an engaging life diary mural. In 1917, she re-grounds herself after illness through her country Asheham House natural history diary; however, she quickly adds a city diary alongside this country diary. And as her experimental first diary stage comes to an intensive close, her diaries both reach out and coalesce. She reads the Goncourt brothers’ collaborative Journals in 1917, which spur her to try a joint diary of her own with Leonard. In her first 1918 Hogarth House diary, she both extends individual diary days and merges them—and blends her country and city styles as well. We leave her in July 1918 ready to launch her mature, spare (modernist) diary style. The diaries Woolf reads during this expansive and coalescing time could not be more fortuitous. The Journals of Mary (Seton) Berry, which Woolf likely reads in early 1916, present an even more fervent voice for women than Mary Coleridge’s—and the whole kernel of A Room of One’s Own. The diaries of the literarycurateStopfordBrooke,reviewedin1917,showWoolfasearching mind, a mind continually opening and unifying across his creative days. In the last year of her life, Woolf tries to remember Stopford Brooke and to write a history of English literature akin to his in her unfinished “Anon.” Virginia Woolf’s 1915 Diary “The day is rather like a leafless tree: there are all sorts of colours in it, if you look closely. But the outline is bare enough.” (January 29, 1915; D 1: 30) A mysterious gap of more than five years yawns between Virginia Woolf’s 1909 life diary and her next surviving diary—a daily diary begun January 1, 1915. 164 Becoming Virginia Woolf This longest hiatus in Woolf’s forty-four-year diary history invites thought. Several scenarios seem possible. Diary books for 1910, 1911, 1912, and perhaps even for part of 1913 may have been kept but then lost in September 1940 when Hitler’s bombs destroyed Woolf’s London flat. She salvaged most of her diary books from the rubble, but did she retrieve them all? How dreadful to think of her diary as a literal casualty of war, and yet how easily this might have occurred.1 The discovery in 2002 of a heretofore unknown diary—Woolf’s 1909 life diary—fuels a more hopeful thought. Perhaps Leonard Woolf possessed other diaries that might yet still emerge. His biographer, Victoria Glendinning, describes the deluge of papers and books that flooded Monk’s House (317). Virginia ’s return to a London diary in 1909 after four years of travel diary kindles hopethatshecontinueddiary-keeping.Wouldadiaristwhohasbeenmaintaining several kinds of diaries rather continuously since Christmas 1904 suddenly stop diarizing altogether from 1910 through 1914? On the other hand, she seems to revisit in her 1908 and 1909 diaries the form and diction of her 1903 diary; perhaps she had explored the diary form all she could by 1909 and turned to other work. Time may clarify this five-year caesura. Intriguingly, Walter Scott, Fanny Burney, and Samuel Pepys appear at the 1915 diary rebirth. These lively British diarists, whom Woolf first read at ages fourteen and fifteen as she launched her own first diary, hover over the new diary, one is tempted to say, like smiling parents. Scott dominates. On January 2, the second day of her diary, Woolf records reading his Guy Mannering. The diary emerges, therefore, with Scott’s prose. Her January 11 entry begins rather erotically: “Leonard was in his bath this morning, & I was lying in bed, wondering whether I should stretch out my hand for Rob Roy, when I heard a commotion next door” (D 1: 15). On January 19 she compares Scott to Dostoevsky, underscoring the elastic, easy style she craves: “[Dostoevsky] seems to me to have the same kind of vitality in him that Scott had; only Scott merely made superb ordinary people, & D. creates wonders, with very subtle brains, & fearful sufferings. Perhaps the likeness to Scott partly consists in the loose, free & easy, style of the translation” (D 1: 23). Six days later, Leonard delights her on her thirty-third birthday with a three-volume first edition of Scott’s novel The Abbot. Scott thus hovers in the background across these days. Woolf also recalls with joy the female diarist she calls “the mother...