Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read by Barbara Lounsberry (review)

The major published diaries of Virginia Woolf come in neatly sequenced books: first the five authoritative volumes scrupulously transcribed and edited by Anne Olivier Bell and, after the first volume, also by Andrew McNeillie, published in the 1970s and ’80s and covering the period of 1915 to Woolf’s death in 1941; and then The Passionate Apprentice (1990), edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, which contains Woolf’s early journals from 1897 to 1909. The division this has set up between Woolf’s “early” (pre-1915) and “mature” (1915 and after) diaries, and the separations between diary years in each of the first five volumes published, map well onto Woolf’s life and professional career, and have inevitably and understandably come to guide readers’ mental conception of Woolf’s development. The early diaries show Woolf prior to her becoming a published novelist; 1915 marks the year of publication for her first novel, The Voyage Out, and also fittingly marks the year in which Woolf’s diary entries resume after a mysterious five-year diary blank. Becoming Virginia Woolf, however, questions these facile divisions. Barbara Lounsberry uses her own categorization system: Woolf’s early diaries from 1897 to mid-1918, where Woolf tested the waters and tentatively discovered her own voice; her later, mature diaries from 1919 to 1929, which show a “spare modernist” style; and her last diary period from 1930 to her death in 1941, distinguishing itself from the previous period by Woolf’s industriousness in writing entries (2). The very first diary period, which best showcases Woolf’s growth, is the subject of Becoming Virginia Woolf.

There are additional, finer categories that Becoming Virginia Woolf works with. Woolf’s holidays and travels define her “Cornwall diary” in 1905, and her “Great Britain travel diary” from 1906 to 1908. There is also thematic designation: Woolf’s “Asheham house natural history diary” from 1917 to 1918, for example, and her “collaborative Hogarth House diary”—so named because of Woolf’s initial intention to write “a double-voiced diary” with contributions from Leonard Woolf, but also because of the increased consciousness of a communal spirit and “collaborative good will” (197) in these pages with Leonard, friends, and Bloomsbury group members. Such cataloging, departing from mere chronology, foregrounds the significance of a particular diary episode for Woolf’s growth.

All this helps further nuance the distinctions set up by the major published diaries. After all, the hiatus in Woolf ’s diary writing between 1909 and 1915 may, Lounsberry imagines, not be a diary lull after all. Might Woolf ’s diary notebooks for these years simply have become lost, perhaps in the bombing of her London house in 1940? Might they still exist, but not have come to light as yet (164)? This is not mere wishful thinking: in 2002, a new 1909 diary was discovered, marking a break from the travel diaries Woolf had been writing since 1906. As Lounsberry writes, only time will answer the last question—but what is possible now is to draw concrete connections between the two time periods, in order to bridge the divide that the lack of extant diary notebooks for these years has encouraged us to work with.

Lounsberry highlights the three key figures who inaugurate Woolf ’s diary writing in 1915, and who inaugurate Becoming Virginia Woolf itself in chapter 1 as early diarists Woolf read when she was fourteen to fifteen years old: Walter Scott, Fanny Burney, and Samuel Pepys. They are described as “smiling parents” (164), with the first two writers/diarists called Woolf ’s diary father and mother. Might reading Scott’s diary at a young age have led to some of the stylistics of Woolf ’s diaries with which we are so familiar—the sometimes breezy tone, the use of initials instead of names, and of ampersands (15); and the diary as a “catch-all” (16)? Might Burney’s diary portraits have provided Woolf with...