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  • Woolf's Diaries, Continued
  • Molly Youngkin
Barbara Lounsberry. Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries and the Diaries She Read. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. ix + 269 pp. $79.95

BARBARA LOUNSBERRY'S Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path continues the exciting project of analyzing Woolf's diaries in relation to the diaries of other writers Woolf read. In the first portion of this project, Becoming Virginia Woolf (reviewed in ELT, 58.4 [2015], 588–91), Lounsberry effectively showed how Woolf used the diary form to experiment with writerly techniques and eventually found her place as a "professional writer," in part by drawing on ideas and themes found in the diaries of Fanny Burney, Mary Coleridge, Samuel Pepys, Walter Scott, and others. In this portion of the project, which focuses on the diaries kept by Woolf from 1918 to 1929, Lounsberry again illustrates how diary-keeping facilitated Woolf's published work, especially emphasizing how Woolf became more focused and brief in her diary entries in order to develop the "spare" modernist aesthetic we associate with her major works written during this period: Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. Lounsberry also connects the development of Woolf's aesthetic and the themes that occupy her major works to her engagement with other writers who "probed the soul" through their diaries, including W. N. P. Barbellion (Journal of a Disappointed Man), James Boswell (Journal of a Tour to Corsica), and Stendhal (The Private Diaries of Stendhal).

Using the same overall chronological organization found in Becoming Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path includes nine chapters in which Lounsberry first discusses the trends found in Woolf's diary for a given year and then discusses what Woolf gained from other writers' diaries she read (and usually reviewed for periodicals) that year. This chronological ordering has the advantage of articulating a clear linear narrative about how Woolf's aesthetic developed over a specific timeframe. For example, we see in chapter one, "Crisis Calls for a New Diary Audience and Purpose," that Woolf's prolonged illness in late 1917 prompts a new vision for her diary, bringing together the previously separate worlds of the city (gendered male) and the country (gendered female) as Woolf's confidence in her role as a woman writer increases. Further, Woolf thinks about her 1918 and 1919 diaries as [End Page 279] sites not only for generating ideas for her major fictional works but also as a place to record ideas that may someday appear in her memoirs, creating an imagined public audience for her diaries.

Across chapters two through eight, Lounsberry methodically moves through each subsequent diary, showing how Woolf explores writing about "the soul's reality" for this new audience and experiments with writing "conversations" as "practice" for Jacob's Room (1920 and 1921 diaries); how she more confidently moves away from the influence of "male voices" and finds her own "voice and motion" by writing "play scenes" in her diary (1922 and 1923 diaries); and how the sense of motion she develops becomes a "creative rush" that allows her to use the diary as a "calendar" for planning works such as Mrs. Dalloway (1924 and 1925 diaries). Still, the creative rush Woolf experiences in 1924–1925 sometimes results in anxiety and illness when pressure to produce limits the time Woolf can devote to the more creative aspects of diary-keeping, but when Woolf reminds herself that the diary can function to balance the pressures she faces, she is able to expand the diary form to comment on "worlds that 'exist' beyond herself and her art" while still "turning inward" to write entries that "plunge her into her creative unconscious" more fully as she writes To the Lighthouse and prepares to write Orlando (1926 and 1927 diaries).

By the time we reach the last chapter of Lounsberry's study, "Artist at the Crossroads," we see how Woolf's use of the diary has matured significantly, even as her 1928 and 1929 diaries illustrate her continuing struggle to decide how to best use her diary to generate ideas for her planned literary works. The 1928 and 1929 diaries, Lounsberry argues, mark another "crucial point" in...

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