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

Epilogue

Epilogue V irginia Woolf leaves a trail in her first dozen diaries that shows how she comes to be the writer we know. Her diaries disclose (when carefully studied ) a clear path of development no biographer yet has shown. The diaries reveal the young writer’s early fascination with change. At seventeen she offers her aesthetic of changing light (“different shades & degrees of light—melting and mixing infinitely”) in her dashingly experimental 1899 Warboys diary (PA 156). In her pivotal 1903 diary at age twenty-one, she turns consciously from London and the male literary tradition to embrace nature (linked to women) and the unconscious, an essential move repeated often across her early diaries. Her choice of the “outsider” role at age twenty-one positions her to become the writer we know. However, her simultaneous drive to find her own “Country In London”revealsthedifficultsynthesisshesought:countryandLondon,nature and culture, unconscious and conscious, female and male. Her persistent move from culture to nature and her drive to merge the two are among her most significant diary acts. The ghostly, haunted 1905 Cornwall diary marks her growing trust in her unconscious, “the inward sea,” and her continued pursuit of empty, untrammeled spaces her imagination could fill. Curiosity enters the diary in 1906 (at age twenty-four) and, in concert with the increasingly trusted unconscious, leads to unwilled spontaneous invention and the first sign of Woolf’s “scenemaking ” gift in her 1907 Playden diary. Woolf’s Continental travel diary of 1906 to 1909 shows her determined march toward a view, voice, and style of her own. She turns again and again from “guidebook prose” and from Western notions of the East to favor her own eye, mind, and prose. Drawn to Prosper Mérimée’s “unknown woman,” she imagines in the longest entry in her Greek diary a woman with “a rare mind, & perhaps, a rare nature”—a woman much like herself (PA 342). In her 1908 Italian diary, she reacts against the still silent beauty of a Perugino painting 226 Becoming Virginia Woolf and offers her own enlarged (and modernist-tending) aesthetic: life in motion, beauty in “infinite discords,” a “whole made of shivering fragments” (PA 393). Her 1909 diaries mark another artistic crossroads. She seeks finer discriminations in thought and greater subtlety and “indefiniteness” in her descriptions; she rejects timidity and determines to make her words blaze. From 1915 to mid-1918, when this volume ends, Woolf’s various diary forms and styles begin finally to fuse. In her six-week 1915 diary at age thirty-two, the now married Woolf weaves place and portrait, thought and event into a richly colored life diary that starts stories and creates a world. With her 1917–18 AshehamHousenaturalhistorydiary ,shere-groundsherself,writesherselfbackfrom illness in the country and through her diary. Tellingly, however, she soon adds a London diary to her country diary and, in her most intensive year of diarykeeping , writes in both diaries on seventeen days. As my volume ends, country andLondondiarystyles joininthefirst1918Hogarthdiary,andWoolf’sdaysare “melted into each other like snowballs roasting in the sun” (D 1: 120). The hallmark of Woolf’s first two decades as a diarist is her constant diary experiment. That her diary was from the first “ever . . . scornful of stated rules!” helped her to stretch and explore (PA 134). From the start to the end of her life, Woolf draws on others’ diaries to aid her as she pursues her own path. Sir Walter Scott and Fanny Burney parent her and set her in diary motion. Others’ diaries both refresh and fortify her. They suggest new ways to live and to see. Fellow writers Fanny Burney, Mary Coleridge, and Mary (Seton) Berry attend to women and their treatment across their diaries, providing Woolf a way of seeing she will follow throughout her days. Their diaries and others’ supply matter for the compost heap she can transmute into art. They give her access to what she calls the natural human voice. In fact, they offer the concert of human voices that she eagerly joins. The very diversity and individuality inherent in diaries propel Woolf toward her own individuality and are part of the great appeal of diaries. By their very existence diaries mean life—life regularly renewed and often life become immortal.  In her next 1918 diary, her thirteenth diary book, Woolf will call the “elastic shape” and the “springy random haphazard galloping” style of Lord Byron’s great poem Don Juan the format she long has sought for...