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

Introduction

Introduction A masterpiece. One of the great diaries of the world. SodeclaredQuentinBell,VirginiaWoolf’snephew,ofherheart-stopping, boundary-stretching diary that serves as a doorway to her fiction and nonfiction . Woolf’s diary is her longest, her longest sustained, and her last work to reach the public. Diary scholar Harriet Blodgett calls it “a high point in English diary-keeping” and “a remarkable social document.”1 Woolf begins her first extant diary at age fourteen in 1897, and her final entry comesattheageoffifty-nine,fourdaysbeforehersuicideinMarch1941.Thirtyeight handwritten diary volumes are safeguarded today in the United States and England. Together they offer some 2,312 entries and 770,000 words—more words than any one of her novels. Like a hidden gold mine, this diary reached readers in tantalizing segments across a half-century: from 1953 to 2003. As each vein of the mother lode appeared , it has been carefully scoured for Woolf’s references to her works or to the talented friends and family members who made up her storied Bloomsbury Group; scoured, too, for the wider circle of notables, including George Bernard Shaw, Vita Sackville-West, T. S. Eliot, and Ethel Smyth, who came to want to know her. The diaries have been sifted, too, for Woolf’s views on a range of subjects—from art to war. What remains now is to understand the diary as a diary: Woolf’s development as a diarist and her place among, and legacy to, the worldwide community of diarists she so greatly valued and admired. However, challenges abound. Diaries are still “terra incognita,” French diary theorist Philippe Lejeune reminded us in 2004 (76). I will argue in this bookthatthisfactmadethediaryparticularlyattractiveto Woolf.Furthermore, as Lejeune also points out, “There is no such thing as a typical diarist” (154). Woolf’s diary itself shifts form radically—particularly across her first two decades as a diarist explored in this book. How to sort through and say something meaningful about such a variegated mass? 2 Becoming Virginia Woolf My answer is to offer close readings of each of her first twelve diary books— something never as yet attempted. Woolf took great care with her diary books throughout her life. In the early years she created and bound the books herself. She treats her 1903 diary as a book with “chapters” and even makes a table of contents. She remarks at the start of her 1918 diary: “There’s no reason after all why one should expect special events for the first page of a new book; still one does,” revealing that she thought of each book as a discrete aesthetic unit—yet part of the enlarging whole (D 1: 99). Following her line, I treat each of her twelve early diaries (1) as a work of art itself; (2) as it relates to her other early diaries; and (3) as it intersects with her public works (letters and published essays, reviews, fiction, and nonfiction). This method lays bare Woolf’s development as a diarist, and, an extra dividend, as a public writer as well. We see— more clearly than ever before—how she becomes the writer so widely revered today. In the following pages, I challenge several long-standing views of Woolf’s diaries. Mitchell Leaska, who published Woolf’s first seven diary books in 1990 under the title A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909, declared that Woolf first offers her “artistic credo” in her 1908 Italian diary (xxvi). I argue here that she articulates her aesthetic much earlier, starting at age seventeen in her 1899 Warboys diary. I also offer a more nuanced reading of Woolf’s newly discovered 1909 diary which has been treated as bitter and even as anti-Semitic since 2002 when it was found in a desk drawer in Wales. I call, too, for reconsideration of the pervading view that Woolf’s diarywriting breaks into two parts: her “apprentice” years from 1897 to 1909, and the remainder of her diary-writing (1915 to 1941). The six volumes of Woolf’s published diary create this view. During an interview of Andrew McNeillie, the assistant editor of Woolf’s 1920 to 1941 diaries, I asked why Anne Olivier Bell, who painstakingly edited the essential five-volume 1915 to 1941 Diary of Virginia Woolf, chose to begin with Woolf’s 1915 diary rather than with the earlier diaries . McNeillie believes the Bells thought of the early volumes as “something apart”—as different from the diaries that unfold from 1915 on. One can understand this...