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

5. EMBRACING THE UNCONSCIOUS

5 Embracing the Unconscious A t age twenty-one Virginia Woolf chooses the outsider role; at twenty-three she turns inward. “All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and nought,” Thomas Carlyle wrote in “Sir Walter Scott”—an essay Woolf likely knew (37). Her 1905 ghostly, haunted Cornwall diary and the 1906 to 1908 Great Britain travel diary that follows it display her growing trust in her own unconscious as both reservoir and compositor. In her 1905 Cornwall diary, Woolf abandons date and subject markers as she pursues “a vast trackless country, without mark or boundary” (PA 297). Her Cornwall “Walk by Night,” repeated five times in the 1907 Playden diary in Sussex , reveals her growing embrace of the night-conscious—the unconscious— andwithit,in1906,thefirstdiarysignsofunwilled,spontaneousinventionand, in 1907, of her “scene-making” gift. Untouched land and uncharted waters draw Woolf repeatedly across these years,herowncreativespacefoundonly afterinsistentturnsfrommalevoices. She reads and reviews three works in 1907 and 1908 that showcase for her further the protean diary form. The Diary of William Allingham, a Victorian poet who knew her family, plants the seed for Freshwater and more. Leaves from the Note-books of Lady Dorothy Nevill displays the merits of scrapbookkeeping and lays the path toward “Miss Ormerod” in “Lives of the Obscure” and to Cassandra Otway and Mrs. Hilbery in Night and Day. Lady Charlotte Bury’s Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting gives Woolf a first look at an officious, letterwriting political toady named Whitbread—the name Woolf will give to her own destructive letter-writing politico in Mrs. Dalloway. It shows her, too, the trials of women writers in the early nineteenth century. 82 Becoming Virginia Woolf Virginia’s Woolf’s Ghostly 1905 Cornwall Diary “some persistent phantom had at last taken shape” (PA 289) “The Ghost Diary” should be the title of Virginia Stephen’s fifth journal, for phantoms and a ghostly aura haunt the Cornwall diary. If her first 1905 diary withers in May, becomes a dull private work to a twenty-three-year-old more absorbed by her public prose, the diary pulse revives in the country (as it has before). The Cornwall diary resembles physically her last two diaries in its selfbinding and soft paper cover—although now a blue-gray shade for Cornwall instead of the previous deep gray. However, it departs completely in form from these earlier journals, for Virginia now tries something new.1 Fifteen entries capture the fifty-six-day Cornwall holiday August 10 to October 4, 1905; however ,onlythefirsttwoentriesare dated.Afterthat,thetenth entry is titled (“The Lands End”), but the other twelve entries sport neither date nor title. Only white space separates them, as if they are vestiges of some larger whole. Each of the fifteen entries addresses a separate topic, and they appear to have been written at different times; however, Woolf’s abandonment of date and subject markers shows her both suspending—and expanding—conventional diary terrain. The diary’s first sentence introduces this altered dimension: “It was with some feeling of enchantment that we took our places yesterday in the Great Western train” (PA 281). Her next sentence personifies the train as a “wizard who was to transport us into another world, almost into another age” (PA 281). Mist and magic envelop the diary as traditional boundaries fade. “We would fain have believed that this little corner of England had slept under some enchanters spell since we last set eyes on it ten [eleven] years ago,” she writes, “& that no breath of change had stirred its leaves, or troubled its waters” (PA 281). When they creep up the driveway to Talland House the first night, the site of more than a decade of happy summers in their youth, and gaze through a chink in the escallonia hedge at the “two lighted windows,” she reports that they “hung there like ghosts” (PA 282). The unmarked third entry hints that the Cornwall “persistent phantom” lost but recovered in this diary is a woman: the diarist’s dead mother, Julia Stephen. When Virginia and Adrian take shelter from the rain in a fifteenth-century parish church, they are stopped by the church’s elderly caretaker, a woman dressed in black who has been seeking news of them. The woman weeps and “poured 83 Embracing the Unconscious forth her memories, her constant remembrance & gratitude” for Julia Stephen’s beauty and charity. “And as I heard those humble words of...