Virginia Woolf, carrying a fur stole. Public area, courtesy of wikimedia commons.
On August 3, 1917, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary for the primary time in two years—a small pocket book, roughly the scale of the palm of her hand. It was a Friday, the beginning of the financial institution vacation, and she or he had traveled from London to Asheham, her rented home in rural Sussex, together with her husband, Leonard. For the primary time in days, it had stopped raining, and so she “walked out from Lewes.” There have been “males mending the wall & roof” of the home, and Will, the gardener, had “dug up the mattress in entrance, leaving just one dahlia.” Lastly, “bees in attic chimney.”
It’s a stilted starting, and but with every entry, her diary good points in confidence. Quickly, Woolf establishes a sample. First, she notes the climate, and her stroll—to the submit, or to fetch the milk, or up onto the Downs. There, she takes down the variety of mushrooms she finds—“nearly a document discover,” or “sufficient for a dish”—and of the bugs she has seen: “3 excellent peacock butterflies, 1 silver washed frit; in addition to innumerable blues feeding on dung.” She notices butterflies particularly: painted girls, clouded yellows, fritillaries, blues. She is blasé in her data of nature’s extra grotesque sights—“the backbone & purple legs of a chicken, simply devoured by a hawk,” or a “hen in a parcel, discovered useless within the nettles, head wrung off.” There may be human violence, too. From the tops of the Downs, she listens to the weapons as they sound from France, and watches German prisoners at work within the fields, who use “an important brown jug for his or her tea.” Residence once more, and she or he reviews any guests, or whether or not she has carried out gardening or studying or stitching. Lastly, she makes a word about rationing, taking inventory of the larder: “eggs 2/9 doz. From Mrs Attfield,” or “sausages right here are available.”
Although Woolf, then thirty-five, shared the lease of Asheham together with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell (who went there for weekend events), for her, the home had at all times been a spot for convalescence. Following her marriage to Leonard in 1912, she entered a protracted tunnel of sickness—a sequence of breakdowns throughout which she refused to eat, talked wildly, and tried suicide. She spent lengthy durations at a nursing dwelling in Twickenham earlier than being delivered to Asheham with a nurse to get well. On the home, Leonard presided over a strict routine, wherein Virginia was permitted to put in writing letters—“solely to the tip of the web page, Mrs Woolf,” as she reported to her pal Margaret Llewelyn Davies—and to take quick walks “in a form of nightgown.” She had been too sick to pay a lot consideration to the publication of her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, or to take discover of the conflict. “Its very like residing on the backside of the ocean being right here,” she wrote to a pal in early 1914, as Bloomsbury scattered. “One typically hears rumours of what’s going on overhead.”
Within the writing about Woolf’s life, the wartime summers at Asheham are usually disregarded. They’re rapidly overtaken by her time in London, the emergence of the Hogarth Press, and the novel new course she took in her work, when her first novels—awkward set-pieces of Edwardian realism—would give strategy to the experimentalism of Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway. And but throughout these summers, Woolf was at a threshold in her life and work. Her small diary is essentially the most detailed account we have now of her days through the summers of 1917 and 1918, when she was strolling, studying, recovering, trying. It’s a bridge between two durations in her work and likewise between sickness and well being, writing and never writing, feeling and looking. Unpacking every entry, we will see the richness of her every day life, the quiet repetition of her actions and pleasures. There isn’t a scarcity of drama: a puncture to her bicycle, a biting canine, the query of whether or not there shall be sufficient sugar for jam. She not often makes use of the unruly “I,” though often we glimpse her, planting a bulb or leaving her waterproof coat in a hedge. Principally she data issues she will see or hear or contact. Having been sick, she is nurturing a convalescent high quality of consideration, utilizing her diary’s economical type, its home material, to tether herself to the world. “Happiness is,” she writes later, in 1925, “to have a bit string onto which issues will connect themselves.” At Asheham, she strings one paragraph after one other; a means of watching the times accrue. And as she recovers, issues connect themselves: bicycles, rubber boots, dahlias, eggs.
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Between 1915 and her demise in 1941, Woolf crammed nearly thirty notebooks with diary entries, starting, at first, with a reasonably self-conscious account of her every day life which developed, from Asheham onward, into a unprecedented, steady document of type and feeling. Her diary was the place the place she practiced writing—or would “do my scales,” as she described it in 1924—and wherein her novels formed themselves: the “escapade” of Orlando written on the peak of her emotions for Vita Sackville-West (“I wish to kick up my heels & be off”); the “playpoem” of The Waves, that “summary mystical eyeless guide,” which started life one summer time’s night in Sussex as “The Moths.” There are additionally the trivialities of her home life, together with scenes from her marriage to Leonard (an argument in 1928, as an illustration, when she slapped his nostril with candy peas, and he purchased her a blue jug) and from her relationship together with her servant, Nellie Boxall, which was by turns antagonistic and dependent. Most of all, the diary is the place wherein she thinks on her toes, enjoying and experimenting. Right here she is in September 1928, making an attempt to explain rooks in flight, and asking,
“Whats the phrase for that?” & attempt to make extra & extra vivid the roughness of the air present & the tremor of the rooks wing <deep breasting it> slicing—as if the air have been stuffed with ridges & ripples & roughnesses; they rise & sink, up & down, as if the train <happy them> rubbed & braced them like swimmers in tough water.
However the “previous satan” of her sickness was by no means far behind. If, in her diary, Woolf may compose herself, she may additionally unravel. There are jagged moments. She may very well be merciless—about her pals, or the sight of suburban ladies purchasing, or Leonard’s Jewish mom. And he or she felt her failures acutely. Within the small hours, she fretted over her childlessness, her rivalries, the wave of her melancholy threatening to crest.
Her diaries’ elasticity, their capability to meet all these makes use of, is, as Adam Phillips notes in his foreword to Granta’s re-creation of the second quantity, proof of “Woolf’s extraordinary invention inside this style.” The Asheham diary was one in all her earliest experiments within the type. She was studying Thoreau’s Walden and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journals, marvelling at these writers’ capability for a language “scraped clear,” their every day lives, and their descriptions of the pure world, intensified for the reader as if “by a really highly effective magnifying glass.” But the life span of her personal rural diary was quick. In October 1917, upon her return to London, Woolf started a second diary, written within the type of these which preceded her breakdowns. Her Asheham diary she left stowed away in a drawer. (When, the next summer time, she reached for the pocket book, writing in each concurrently, it was the one time she saved two diaries without delay.) In her different diary, the ligatures loosened, and she or he started creating the supple, longhand type she would use for the remainder of her life. Her concision was gone, although her Asheham diary had left its mark. In London, she continued to open every day together with her “vegetable notes”—an account of her stroll alongside the Thames, or a word in regards to the climate. And he or she described every little thing she noticed with the curiosity and precision of a naturalist’s eye.
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Within the lengthy and sometimes fraught historical past of the publication of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, nobody has identified what to do with such a sporadic pocket book, seemingly out of sync with the a lot fuller diaries that got here earlier than and after it. Following Leonard’s number of entries for A Author’s Diary, which was revealed in 1953, work on the publication of her diaries of their entirety started in 1966, when the artwork historian Anne Olivier Bell was aiding her husband, Quentin Bell, within the writing of his aunt’s biography. As parcels of Woolf’s papers arrived on the couple’s dwelling in Sussex, Olivier—the title by which she was at all times identified—realized the dimensions of the venture, which concerned organizing, noting, and indexing 2,317 pages of Woolf’s non-public writing. She leaped on the probability, “largely,” she later mirrored, “as a result of it gave me an excuse to learn Virginia’s diary, which I longed to do.” So started practically twenty years of scholarship, culminating of their publication, in 5 volumes, by the Hogarth Press, between 1977 and 1984.
It was a laborious course of. Working first from carbon copies—which wanted to be pieced again collectively after Leonard had gone by them, with scissors, to make his alternatives —and later from photocopies (the manuscript diaries have been moved in 1971 from the Westminster Financial institution in Lewes to the Berg Assortment on the New York Public Library), Olivier set about developing her “scaffolding”: she took six-by-four-inch index playing cards, one for every month of Woolf’s life, and recorded on them the dates in that month on which Woolf had written an entry, the place she had been, and who she had seen. Olivier spent lengthy hours within the basement of the London Library, consulting the Dictionary of Nationwide Biography for particulars of one in all Virginia’s pals, or decaying editions of the Instances for a discover a few explicit live performance at Wigmore Corridor. And there have been selections to make. What to do with Woolf at her most unkind, or snobbish? Olivier devised some fundamental guidelines for inclusion: she pinned a chunk of paper above her desk that learn ACCURACY / RELEVANCE / CONCISION / INTEREST. She determined there was little level in upsetting these pals nonetheless residing, and lower any significantly unflattering descriptions. And Woolf’s Asheham diary—“too completely different in character” from the opposite diaries, she famous, and “too laconic”—didn’t advantage publishing in full. The second quantity, from the summer time of 1918, was omitted utterly.
This summer time, Granta has reissued Woolf’s diaries and billed them as “unexpurgated,” a promise that has triggered no small stir amongst Woolf students, who had thought Olivier’s editions have been full. The brand new inclusions are, the truth is, principally minor: a handful of feedback about Woolf’s pals, written towards the tip of her life, together with an disagreeable description of Igor Anrep’s mouth. In any other case, Olivier’s quantity divisions stay unchanged, her notes and indexes intact; it’s as a lot a replica, and a celebration, of her scholarly masterpiece as of Woolf’s diaristic eye. Essentially the most important addition is Asheham. For the primary time, Woolf’s small diary—the final remaining autobiographical fragment to be revealed—seems in its entirety. And but these readers turning to Granta’s version for particulars of Woolf’s nation life in 1918 should skip to the tip of the primary quantity, and search for her diary beneath the heading “Appendix 3.”
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Appendixes may be awkward, unwieldy issues. They serve a scholarly operate—to current data deemed unsuitable for the primary physique of a textual content, like an attachment, or an afterthought. And an appendix is an particularly odd place for a diary, placing outing of sequence, disrupting the “present”—as Woolf appreciated to name it—of on a regular basis life. The remaining paragraphs of the Asheham diary have been relegated behind the primary textual content; they sit quietly, unobtrusively, documenting a life as minute and home as earlier than. Returning to the home in 1918, Woolf data her days, the winter melting into spring—the final of the diary, and the conflict. Out on her walks, she sees “a number of brown heath butterflies,” the air “swarming with little black beetles.” She spends afternoons on the terrace, the solar sizzling, “needed to put on straw hat,” and within the night, she and Leonard sit “consuming our personal broad beans—scrumptious.” There are extra native intrigues: the coal from the cellar goes lacking, a mysterious plague kills the farmer’s lambs. Day-to-day, she watches a caterpillar pupate. The information is best from France. Nonetheless, the German prisoners work within the fields. “When alone, I smile on the tall German.” However her entries are thinning. By September, there’s “nothing to note” on the Downs, or “nothing new.” Even the butterflies are much less good—a number of tortoiseshells, some ragged blues. Lastly, towards the again of the pocket book, she lists the family linen to be washed.
Her consideration had begun shifting elsewhere. In London, she was changing into intensely preoccupied with the Press, and with writing shorter issues, impressions and shade research—the items that may make up her first guide of tales, Monday or Tuesday, revealed in 1921. And but, if one appears to be like carefully, one can see the diary in a few of these tales; one thing like an underpainting.
Take, as an illustration, Katherine Mansfield’s go to to Asheham in August 1917. The diary’s abstract of Katherine’s go to is temporary: her prepare into Lewes was late, so Woolf purchased a bulb for the flowerbed; later, the 2 writers walked on the terrace collectively, an airship maneuvering overhead. But from letters, we all know that the manuscript for Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” was nearly actually introduced out. In it, we will see the imprint of Asheham, its reversal of scales, its teeming insect life. Within the story, which was revealed in 1919, human life takes place off middle, within the murmur of dialog wafting above the flower mattress, whereas the “huge inexperienced areas” of the mattress and the snail laboring over his crumbs of earth loom largest of all. The story, although set in Richmond, captures the environment of Asheham. Its type, like the opposite tales in Monday or Tuesday, owes a lot to the episodic construction of her diary, wherein impressions are hazy, phrases come and go, and a spotlight is each microscopic and summary. And its authorial presence mirrors the one we discover within the pocket book—a author who’s each there and never there, trying and noticing.
Towards the tip of 1918, as Woolf’s convalescence involves an finish, so does her Asheham diary. Again in London, she muses on the venture she has saved going for 2 years: “Asheham diary drains off my meticulous observations of flowers, clouds, beetles & the worth of eggs,” she writes in her different, longer diary, “&, being alone, there isn’t any different occasion to document.” It has served its objective, paving a means again to writing after sickness, of nursing her consideration again to life. Although it was later forgotten, it at all times stood for one in all her quietest and arguably most vital durations, between her first makes an attempt at writing and people fleeting experiments which decided the novels that got here afterward. And it continued to be a storehouse for pictures to be drawn upon later—her nephews, Julian and Quentin Bell, carrying dwelling antlers, like these within the attic nursery in To The Lighthouse; a grass snake on the trail, just like the one Giles Oliver crushes along with his tennis shoe in Between the Acts; a steady stream of butterflies and moths.
Harriet Baker is a British author. Her work has appeared within the London Assessment of Books, the Instances Literary Complement, and Apollo, among others. Her first guide, Rural Hours: The Nation Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, shall be revealed by Allen Lane in March 2024.
