Selected Diaries

"Yes, completely. It’s a life’s work for her. It’s an astonishing thing to have decades of almost daily diary entries from a great writer, who tells you about her work in progress, about her innermost thoughts, about the people she knows, about everything she’s been doing. They’re written in a different way from the novels, and she often talks in the diaries about how she’s writing them. She invents what she calls a loose, quick, free style; she’s trying not to correct herself. When you read them, the actual physical things, sometimes she’s writing so fast, with very few crossings out or blots, that you can see the line of the handwriting dipping down towards the end of the line. This is her mind pouring out at you. Of course, there are times when you can see she’s thinking, ‘maybe I’ll write a really good description of Yeats or H. G. Wells now, and then when I’m dead, people will publish my diaries, and read it’. There’s a slight self-consciousness there. But the diary works on many levels. It works as a practice book: she’s practising certain kinds of sentences. It works as a therapeutic book: she says ‘I’m going to calm myself down now by writing this in the book’. And it is a commentary on work in progress: she tells you the first thought she has of To the Lighthouse , or Mrs Dalloway . Just to give you an example, there are a couple of pages, over four days in October 1922, where she moves from a visit from ‘Tom Eliot’, as she calls him—who she thinks may be wearing lipstick, and is somewhat overbearing and threatening to her, but is someone in whom she is much interested—to anxiety because her novel, Jacob’s Room, is about to come out, and then to a sense of great pleasure or freedom. She says: ‘At last, I like reading my own writing. . . . I have done my task here better than I expected’. She’s pleased for Jacob’s Room . ‘At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain—how to get the greatest amount of pleasure and work out of it. The secret is I think always so to contrive that work is pleasant’. Then somebody dies—an acquaintance called Kitty Maxse—and there’s a whole page on that, which has interrupted her train of thought. If you have read Mrs Dalloway , you can see that that death is somehow going to make its way into that novel. And then she jumps onto the fact that Jacob’s Room is coming out. She says to herself: ‘My sensations?—they remain calm’. It’s as if she’s telling herself: stay calm; how am I feeling? She’s monitoring herself in the diaries, taking her own temperature with a thermometer. Then she says she’s writing a chapter about Greek literature: ‘I must get on with my reading for the Greek literature’. She is reading ‘some Sophocles & Euripides & a Plato dialogue: also the lives of Bentley & Jebb’. All that is happening in two pages. Death, life, reading, publication, self-monitoring. Amazing. There are lots of different ways of doing it. If you want to start reading a particular Virginia Woolf book, say To the Lighthouse , what you can do is go to the index for the diaries, and look up To the Lighthouse . There’s a good index for the diaries in the five-volume edition. You can read all the entries of how she first thinks of the novel, how she’s working on it. You can read the diaries as a sourcebook for the writing. Or if you’re interested in how she reacts to, say, a visit to Thomas Hardy , you look up ‘Thomas Hardy’. Or you can just dip in. You can go to them for lots of different things. But you never go to them without feeling that you know this person, and that this voice is vividly coming at you off the page. We’re so privileged to have this. Thank god her husband Leonard didn’t do what she asked him to do, in the note that she left him when she went to drown herself, which was to destroy all her papers."