I’ve been a little obsessed with Virginia Woolf recently.
Something happened after reading Olivia Laing’s excellent ‘To the River’ and since then I’ve found myself
wanting to know more about this woman, this writer, who seems to be remembered
more for walking into the River Ouse with her pockets weighted with stones than
for her groundbreaking fiction. I’ve also been pretty obsessed with memoirs and
personal stories, so Virginia Woolf’s diaries seemed a perfect read to me. It
was also helpful that the wonderful Persephone Books include her diaries, as edited by her husband Leonard Woolf, in
their catalogue so not only was I going to read insights from the mind of a
great writer, I also got to lend my (small) support to the independent
publishing industry. Oh, how virtuous am I?
Virginia Woolf’s diaries run into many volumes, but this
condensed version focuses on those entries which centre around the act and art
of writing, the thorny development of a book and Woolf’s fears and
uncertainties about how calibre as a writer. It makes for an interesting read,
and perhaps the best introduction to Woolf who is in fiction a somewhat
difficult writer to read. In her diaries, however, she is sharp and engaging,
insightful and amusing. What emerges is Woolf the human being, an individual
struggling with the thorny activity that is creative writing. The diaries begin
in 1918, during the period when Woolf is writing Night and Day, and follows
through to her death in 1941. During this time we see Woolf following a pattern
in her writing: she has an idea, is excited, starts writing though maybe whilst
writing something else which becomes like a millstone around her neck, hates
what she has written, suffers self-doubt and destructive feelings, edits edits
and more edits, waits impatiently (whilst not wanting to know) for Leonard’s
opinion, receives good feedback, feels relieved, glad it’s over, publishes,
waits in dread for the reviews. As a budding writer, reading about a writer of
Woolf’s calibre working through that arc, book after book, is somewhat
heartening. It gives me hope (though hopefully won’t drive me to the river).
What makes Woolf’s diaries so sparkling, however, is Woolf
herself. Her poetic expression, her keen insight. Even when tinkering around in
her diary, she displays her keen eye and artistic temperament, no matter how
seemingly ordinary the subject. She lends insight into everything. On
Shakespeare:
“I read Shakespeare directly I have finished writing. When my mind is
agape and red-hot. Then it is astonishing. I never knew how amazing his stretch
and speed and word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace and
outrace my own, seeming to start equal and then I see him draw ahead and do
things I could not in my wildest tumult and utmost press of mind imagine.”
On London:
“London is enchanting.
I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet, it seems, and get carried into
beauty without raising a finger. The nights are amazing, with all the white
porticos and broad silent avenues. And people pop in and out, lightly, divertingly
like rabbits; and I look down Southampton Row, wet as a seal’s back or red and
yellow with sunshine, and watch the omnibuses going and coming and hear the old
crazy organs.”
On Life:
“Now is life very
solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone
on for ever; will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the world – this moment
I stand on.”
There’s a great deal of ground covered in Woolf’s diaries,
and it makes for an interesting read from a number of perspectives: Woolf as a
writer, Woolf as a woman, Woolf as a depressive – though I should say that her
depressiveness does not come across greatly in the diary. Then there is the
wider Bloomsbury set, her meeting with Thomas Hardy (which is beautiful), his
funeral, her relationships with Roger Fry and E. M. Forster, Vita
Sackville-West and Leonard Woolf himself, of course. The inter-war years, the
coming of WWII and how it affected and, in the end it seems, destroyed her. For
me it was Woolf as a writer and as an insightful, intelligent woman living in a
way that women simply didn’t in those days: childless (unapologetically so) and
independent, writing groundbreaking fiction and the value of a room of one’s
own.
Virginia Woolf’s diaries are an excellent read, and one that
benefit from multiple readings. A pleasure, like a long slow walk along the
riverside on a sunny day, crickets chirping, pike leaping and long meadow
grasses swaying in a cool wind, plump clouds overhead, just passing.
A Writer’s Diary receives a pleasurable 10 out of 10 Biis.
One to read and read.
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