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

1. EARLY DIARY INFLUENCES

1 Early Diary Influences T he word “influence” comes from the Latin influere, meaning “to flow in.” This chapter reveals how early others’ diaries flow through Virginia Woolf’s young mind, and shape not only her soon-to-be-started diary but also her future public prose. At age fourteen she finds her diary parents—important literary parents—in Sir Walter Scott and Fanny Burney. She adopts all her diary ’s stylistic traits from Scott’s diary—and other aesthetic views as well. In his many-sidedness he serves as a vital model and mentor. Burney, whom Woolf calls the “mother of English fiction,” reinforces many of Scott’s diary traits, but Burney also takes note of women in her diary and provides young Virginia with a way of seeing she will use throughout her life. Woolf’s uncanny parallels with Burney and her haunting interaction with this diary mother are explored here at length. At age fifteen, Woolf reads Samuel Pepys’s celebrated diary, another London Nobody (like Burney) who becomes famous through his pen. Pepys models busy London success—and diary success across the ages. Six months later, as Virginia considers college for herself, she reads Extracts from the Letters and Journals of William Cory, the poet, beloved master of Eton and fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. His Journals describe English male public school and university life: she sees what she is missing. Cory offers compensations, however: detritus for the compost heap Woolf will transform into art. The influx of influence begins. The young girl’s skillful use of these early diary sources impresses. Samuel Johnson writes of “the salutary influence of example” (170). Like all influences, the diaries the teenager reads prompt, foster , dispose, nourish, and embolden her in certain ways; more than anything, they set her in motion. 12 Becoming Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf’s 1897 Diary “there was no room” (April 11, 1897; PA 68) “We have all started to keep a record of the new year—Nessa, Adrian and I.” These, the first words to reach us from Virginia Stephen, diarist, suggest she thought of diaries as plural as well as single: as a concert of human voices. This start should be recalled as her lifelong play with other diaries unfurls. A diary affirms the fourteen-year-old’s place in a journal-writing family. Her father keeps a diary, as did her grandmother Stephen, her Quaker aunt (Caroline Stephen), and her older cousin, Katherine Stephen. Stella Duckworth, Virginia ’s twenty-seven-year-old half-sister and now substitute mother, also keeps a diary, and Thoby, her much-admired older brother, keeps a notebook “with careful observations and drawings of birds and animals” (Lee 223). Now the other Stephen children at home will keep diaries too. Diary-writing, in short, probably does not seem at all remarkable to the young girl; rather, it is a practice most family members pursue. Although by her fifteenth birthday, January 25, 1897, she is well launched in her small brown leather diary with its lock and key, she receives another diary as a gift from her cousin Mia. Diary giving, in fact, may have been a family custom, for in May Virginia buys a diary for her half-brother, George Duckworth, and purchases another diary as a birthday gift for her older sister, Vanessa. The quality and character of a diary book matter to the young diarist, for after only a week of diary -keeping, Virginia writes that her own leather diary “must and shall survive Nessas1 Collins and Renshaw. It has a key, and beautiful boards, and is much superior” (PA 10). Writing—especially diary writing—forges a bond with her older sister. “Nessa drew at the ‘Oak Davenport’ which holds all our paper now and is very nice,” Virginia writes January 22, “and I wrote on a table beside her” (PA 19). Diary-writing links Virginia to older and busier family members, but it also allows her to vent private rebellions and chart her own course. As diary scholar Elizabeth Podnieks writes, the very act of diary-keeping “registers concern and respect for one’s self, life, feelings, and experiences” (65). Podnieks joins Adrienne Rich, Harriet Blodgett, Judy Simons, Deborah Martinson, Joanne Campbell Tidwell, and others in finding the diary a particularly attractive form for females, for here may be found “a private persona . . . often at odds with the public image of feminine propriety” (Simons 202). The 1897 diary reveals just [18.188.40.207...