A Writer's Diary

A Writer's Diary

Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Edited by Leonard Woolf

A Harvest Book • Harcourt, Inc.
San Diego New York London

Copyright 1954, 1953 by Leonard Woolf
Copyright renewed 1982, 1981 by
Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,
or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any
part of the work should be mailed to the following
address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Woolf, Virginia (Stephen) 1882–1941.
A writer's diary.
1. Woolf, Virginia (Stephen) 1882–1941.
I. Title.

[PR6045.072Z5 1973] 828'.9'1203[B] 73–5737
ISBN 0-15-602791-7

Printed in the United States of America
E G I J H F

CONTENTS

PREFACE vii

GLOSSARY OF NAMES USED IN THE DIARY xi

1918 1

1919 7

1920 22

1921 29

1922 41

1923 54

1924 61

1925 70

1926 84

1927 102

1928 120

1929 138

1930 149

1931 161

1932 173

1933 186

1934 208

1935 228

1936 254

1937 265

1938 278

1939 299

1940 311

1941 348

GENERAL INDEX 353

INDEX OF BOOKS 355

PREFACE

In 1915 Virginia Woolf began regularly to write a diary. She continued to do so until 1941 and the last entry is four days before her death. She did not write it regularly every day. There are sometimes entries daily for several days; more usually there is an entry every few days and then there will perhaps be a gap of a week or two. But the diary gives for 27 years a consecutive record of what she did, of the people whom she saw, and particularly of what she thought about those people, about herself, about life, and about the books she was writing or hoped to write. She wrote it on blank sheets of paper (8¼″ by 10½″, i.e. technically large post quarto). At first the sheets were clipped together with loose-leaf rings, but all the later diaries are in bound volumes. We used to have the sheets bound up in paper over boards, and the cover paper is nearly always one of the coloured, patterned Italian papers which we frequently used for binding books of poetry published by us in The Hogarth Press and of which she was very fond. We used to buy the paper for the sheets and have it bound up in books ready for her to use, and she wrote her novels in this kind of book as well as her diary. When she died, she left 26 volumes of diary written in this kind of book in her own hand.

The diary is too personal to be published as a whole during the lifetime of many people referred to in it. It is, I think, nearly always a mistake to publish extracts from diaries or letters, particularly if the omissions have to be made in order to protect the feelings or reputations of the living. The omissions almost always distort or conceal the true character of the diarist or letter-writer and produce spiritually what an Academy picture does materially, smoothing out the wrinkles, warts, frowns, and asperities. At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer, because, as Virginia Woolf herself remarks somewhere in these diaries, one gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood—irritation or misery, say—and of not writing one's diary when one is feeling the opposite. The portrait is therefore from the start unbalanced, and, if someone then deliberately removes another characteristic, it may well become a mere caricature.

Nevertheless the present book is composed of extracts from Virginia Woolf's diaries. She used her diary partly, in the normal way of diarists, to record what she did and what she thought about people, life, and the universe. But she also used it in a very individual way as a writer and artist. In it she communed with herself about the books she was writing or about future books which she intended to write. She discusses the day-to-day problems of plot or form, of character or exposition, which she encounters in each of her books as she conceives them or writes or revises them. Her position as an artist and the merits of her books are a subject of dispute, and no prudent man would claim to judge to a nicety the place which a contemporary writer will occupy in the pantheon of letters. Some critics are irritated and many less sophisticated readers are bewildered by her later novels. But no one denies that she was a serious artist and there are many people who, like Professor Bernard Blackstone, have no doubt that "she was a great artist," that "she did supremely well what no one else has attempted to do," and that her "world will survive as the crystal survives under the crushing rockmasses." * And it is relevant to what I have to say in this preface that many of the people who cannot understand or dislike or ridicule her novels agree that in The Common Reader and her other books of essays she showed herself to be a very remarkable literary critic.

I have been carefully through the 26 volumes of diary and have extracted and now publish in this volume practically everything which referred to her own writing. I have included also three other kinds of extract. The first consists of a certain number of passages in which she is obviously using the diaryas a method of practising or trying out the art of writing. The second consists of a few passages which, though not directly or indirectly concerned with her writings, I have deliberately selected because they give the reader an idea of the direct impact upon her mind of scenes and persons, i.e. of the raw material of her art. Thirdly I have included a certain number of passages in which she comments upon the books she was reading.

The book throws light upon Virginia Woolf's intentions, objects, and methods as a writer.