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

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. “A Woman Writer’s Diary: Virginia Woolf Revisited,” 57, 58–59. 2.In1924,LadyAnneClifford’sdiarybecameafifthdiaryWoolfregularlyrevisited. 3. Panthea Reid explores the jealousy and the sisterly rivalry of brush versus pen in Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf. Chapter 1. Early Diary Influences 1. Writing at breakneck speed, Woolf often left out apostrophes. All quotations from her diaries and letters will reproduce her text. 2. In her 1939 memoir “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf recalls youthful ecstatic feelings related to Stella’s engagement which suggest she had more positive thoughts at some point. That she does not share them with her 1897 diary suggests both that the “ecstatic moment” came before 1897 (in late 1896 perhaps) and also that the diary in 1897 functioned primarily as a defensive tool, a site of resistance. 3. Lockhart 8: 108. Scott’s two diary volumes were larger than Virginia’s, however: nine inches by eight inches. 4. Leslie Stephen owned Thomas Moore’s The Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, edited by Scott; therefore, it is possible, even likely, that Woolf read Byron’s diary as well as Scott’s, although she never specifically mentions doing so in her diaries, letters, or reading notebooks. 5. “A Scottish wedding should be seen at a distance,” Scott writes, “—the gay band of dancers just distinguished amid the elderly group of the spectators—the glass held high, and the distant cheers as it is swallowed, should be only a sketch, not a finished Dutch picture, when it becomes brutal and boorish” (Lockhart 8: 323). 6. “Here is a day’s task before you—the siege of Toulon,” Scott writes in 1826 of his work on Buonapart. “Call you that a task? d—m me, I’ll write it as fast as Boney carried it on” (Lockhart 8: 326). 7. Thomas Carlyle declared, in fact, that “No fresher paintings of Nature can be found than Scott’s” (74). 228 8. Harriet Blodgett, historian and anthologist of English women’s diaries, insists that“ReticencehasbeencharacteristicofEnglishwomen’sseculardiary-keepingsince the inception of the practice in the late 16th century when the earliest extant true diarist in English, Lady Margaret Hoby (1571–1633), made a habit of discreet silence in the diary she kept from 1599 to 1605” (“A Woman Writer’s Diary” 64). Hermione Lee reminds us that Leslie Stephen also exhibited “a fierce stoicism which she [Woolf] would develop herself” (71). Woolf’s diary invites a reconsideration of diary candor. 9. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf has Charles Tansley report over dinner that “One of his uncles kept the light on some rock or other off the Scottish coast” (92). Scott’s 1814 diary of his voyage on the Lighthouse Yacht to Scottish lighthouses (reprinted in Lockhart’s Memoirs) includes these suggestive passages: “As the keepers’ families live here, they are apprized each morning by a signal that all is well. If this signal be not made, a tender sails for the rock directly” (3: 138). Lockhart adds a footnote to report that when asked to inscribe his name in the lighthouse album, Scott “penned immediately the following lines: PHAROS LOQUITUR Far in the bosom of the deep, / O’er these wild shelves my watch I keep; / A ruddy gem of changeful light, / Bound on the dusky brow of night, / The seaman bids my luster hail, / And scorns to strike his timorous sail” (3: 137). 10. Burney’s mother died when she was ten. Annie Raine Ellis, the editor of the two-volume Early Diary of Frances Burney (1892), writes that when Fanny was told of her mother’s death, “the agony of Frances’s grief was so great . . . that Mrs. Shields declared that she had never met with a child of such intense and acute feelings” (1: xlv–xlvi). Dr. Burney was a widower with six children when he married a widow with three children. They had two children together. The doctor’s income was a good one, “but it depended upon his health, which had once before failed,” a situation parallel to Leslie Stephen’s (Early Diary 1: 3). Fanny served as Dr. Burney’s amanuensis to the detriment of her own writing. On February 26, 1897, Virginia tells her diary: “I began to do some shorthand for father” (PA 43). Across her diaries Fanny extols her sister Susanna as “the person most dear to me upon earth!” an affection parallel to Virginia’s feelings for her sister, Vanessa (Diary and Letters of...