{"id":164703,"date":"2023-06-21T10:46:29","date_gmt":"2023-06-21T14:46:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=164703"},"modified":"2023-06-21T13:01:56","modified_gmt":"2023-06-21T17:01:56","slug":"virginia-woolfs-forgotten-diary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/06\/21\/virginia-woolfs-forgotten-diary\/","title":{"rendered":"Virginia Woolf\u2019s Forgotten Diary"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Virginia Woolf, wearing a fur stole. Public domain, courtesy of wikimedia commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

On August 3, 1917, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary for the first time in two years\u2014a small notebook, roughly the size of the palm of her hand. <\/em><\/strong>It was a Friday, the start of the bank holiday, and she had traveled from London to Asheham, her rented house in rural Sussex, with her husband, Leonard. For the first time in days, it had stopped raining, and so she \u201cwalked out from Lewes.\u201d There were \u201cmen mending the wall & roof\u201d of the house, and Will, the gardener, had \u201cdug up the bed in front, leaving only one dahlia.\u201d Finally, \u201cbees in attic chimney.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a stilted beginning, and yet with each entry, her diary gains in confidence. Soon, Woolf establishes a pattern. First, she notes the weather, and her walk\u2014to the post, or to fetch the milk, or up onto the Downs. There, she takes down the number of mushrooms she finds\u2014\u201calmost a record find,\u201d or \u201cenough for a dish\u201d\u2014and of the insects she has seen: \u201c3 perfect peacock butterflies, 1 silver washed frit; besides innumerable blues feeding on dung.\u201d She notices butterflies in particular: painted ladies, clouded yellows, fritillaries, blues. She is blas\u00e9 in her records of nature\u2019s more gruesome sights\u2014\u201cthe spine & red legs of a bird, just devoured by a hawk,\u201d or a \u201cchicken in a parcel, found dead in the nettles, head wrung off.\u201d There is human violence, too. From the tops of the Downs, she listens to the guns as they sound from France, and watches German prisoners at work in the fields, who use \u201ca great brown jug for their tea.\u201d Home again, and she reports any visitors, or whether she has done gardening or reading or sewing. Lastly, she makes a note about rationing, taking stock of the larder: \u201ceggs 2\/9 doz. From Mrs Attfield,\u201d or \u201csausages here come in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though Woolf, then thirty-five, shared the lease of Asheham with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell (who went there for weekend parties), for her, the house had always been a place for convalescence. Following her marriage to Leonard in 1912, she entered a long tunnel of illness\u2014a series of breakdowns during which she refused to eat, talked wildly, and attempted suicide. She spent long periods at a nursing home in Twickenham before being brought to Asheham with a nurse to recover. At the house, Leonard presided over a strict routine, in which Virginia was permitted to write letters\u2014\u201conly to the end of the page, Mrs Woolf,\u201d as she reported to her friend Margaret Llewelyn Davies\u2014and to take short walks \u201cin a kind of nightgown.\u201d She had been too ill to pay much attention to the publication of her first novel, The Voyage Out<\/em>, in 1915, or to take notice of the war. \u201cIts very like living at the bottom of the sea being here,\u201d she wrote to a friend in early 1914, as Bloomsbury scattered. \u201cOne sometimes hears rumours of what is going on overhead.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the writing about Woolf\u2019s life, the wartime summers at Asheham tend to be disregarded. They are quickly overtaken by her time in London, the emergence of the Hogarth Press, and the radical new direction she took in her work, when her first novels\u2014awkward set-pieces of Edwardian realism\u2014would give way to the experimentalism of Jacob\u2019s Room<\/em> and Mrs. Dalloway<\/em>. And yet during these summers, Woolf was at a threshold in her life and work. Her small diary is the most detailed account we have of her days during the summers of 1917 and 1918, when she was walking, reading, recovering, looking. It is a bridge between two periods in her work and also between illness and health, writing and not writing, looking and feeling. Unpacking each entry, we can see the richness of her daily life, the quiet repetition of her activities and pleasures. There is no shortage of drama: a puncture to her bicycle, a biting dog, the question of whether there will be enough sugar for jam. She rarely uses the unruly \u201cI,\u201d although occasionally we glimpse her, planting a bulb or leaving her mackintosh in a hedge. Mostly she records things she can see or hear or touch. Having been ill, she is nurturing a convalescent quality of attention, using her diary\u2019s economical form, its domestic subject matter, to tether herself to the world. \u201cHappiness is,\u201d she writes later, in 1925, \u201cto have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.\u201d At Asheham, she strings one paragraph after another; a way of watching the days accrue. And as she recovers, things attach themselves: bicycles, rubber boots, dahlias, eggs.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Between 1915 and her death in 1941, Woolf filled almost thirty notebooks with diary entries, beginning, at first, with a fairly self-conscious account of her daily life which developed, from Asheham onward, into an extraordinary, continuous record of form and feeling. Her diary was the place where she practiced writing\u2014or would \u201cdo my scales,\u201d as she described it in 1924\u2014and in which her novels shaped themselves: the \u201cescapade\u201d of Orlando\u00a0<\/em>written at the height of her feelings for Vita Sackville-West (\u201cI want to kick up my heels & be off\u201d); the \u201cplaypoem\u201d of The Waves<\/em>, that \u201cabstract mystical eyeless book,\u201d which began life one summer\u2019s evening in Sussex as \u201cThe Moths.\u201d There are also the minutiae of her domestic life, including scenes from her marriage to Leonard (an argument in 1928, for instance, when she slapped his nose with sweet peas, and he bought her a blue jug) and from her relationship with her servant, Nellie Boxall, which was by turns antagonistic and dependent. Most of all, the diary is the place in which she thinks on her feet, playing and experimenting. Here she is in September 1928, attempting to describe rooks in flight, and asking,<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhats the phrase for that?\u201d & try to make more & more vivid the roughness of the air current & the tremor of the rooks wing <deep breasting it> slicing\u2014as if the air were full of ridges & ripples & roughnesses; they rise & sink, up & down, as if the exercise <pleased them> rubbed & braced them like swimmers in rough water.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But the \u201cold devil\u201d of her illness was never far behind. If, in her diary, Woolf could compose herself, she could also unravel. There are jagged moments. She could be cruel\u2014about her friends, or the sight of suburban women shopping, or Leonard\u2019s Jewish mother. And she felt her failures acutely. In the small hours, she fretted over her childlessness, her rivalries, the wave of her depression threatening to crest.<\/p>\n

Her diaries\u2019 elasticity, their ability to fulfill all these uses, is, as Adam Phillips notes in his foreword to Granta\u2019s new edition of the second volume, evidence of \u201cWoolf\u2019s extraordinary invention within this genre.\u201d The Asheham diary was one of her earliest experiments in the form. She was reading Thoreau\u2019s Walden<\/em> and Dorothy Wordsworth\u2019s Grasmere journals, marvelling at those writers\u2019 capacity for a language \u201cscraped clean,\u201d their daily lives, and their descriptions of the natural world, intensified for the reader as if \u201cthrough a very powerful magnifying glass.\u201d Yet the life span of her own rural diary was short. In October 1917, upon her return to London, Woolf began a second diary, written in the style of those which preceded her breakdowns. Her Asheham diary she left stowed away in a drawer. (When, the following summer, she reached for the notebook, writing in both concurrently, it was the only time she kept two diaries at once.) In her other diary, the ligatures loosened, and she began developing the supple, longhand style she would use for the rest of her life. Her concision was gone, though her Asheham diary had left its mark. In London, she continued to open each day with her \u201cvegetable notes\u201d\u2014an account of her walk along the Thames, or a note about the weather. And she described everything she saw with the curiosity and precision of a naturalist\u2019s eye.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In the long and often fraught history of the publication of Virginia Woolf\u2019s diaries, no one has known what to do with such a sporadic notebook, seemingly out of sync with the much fuller diaries that came before and after it. Following Leonard\u2019s selection of entries for A Writer\u2019s Diary<\/em>, which was published in 1953, work on the publication of her diaries in their entirety began in 1966, when the art historian Anne Olivier Bell was assisting her husband, Quentin Bell, in the writing of his aunt\u2019s biography. As parcels of Woolf\u2019s papers arrived at the couple\u2019s home in Sussex, Olivier\u2014the name by which she was always known\u2014realized the scale of the project, which involved organizing, noting, and indexing 2,317 pages of Woolf\u2019s private writing. She leaped at the chance, \u201clargely,\u201d she later reflected, \u201cbecause it gave me an excuse to read Virginia\u2019s diary, which I longed to do.\u201d So began nearly twenty years of scholarship, culminating in their publication, in five volumes, by the Hogarth Press, between 1977 and 1984.<\/p>\n

It was a laborious process. Working first from carbon copies\u2014which needed to be pieced back together after Leonard had gone through them, with scissors, to make his selections \u2014and later from photocopies (the manuscript diaries were moved in 1971 from the Westminster Bank in Lewes to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library), Olivier set about constructing her \u201cscaffolding\u201d: she took six-by-four-inch index cards, one for each month of Woolf\u2019s life, and recorded on them the dates in that month on which Woolf had written an entry, where she had been, and who she had seen. Olivier spent long hours in the basement of the London Library, consulting the Dictionary of National Biography<\/em> for details of one of Virginia\u2019s friends, or decaying editions of the Times<\/em> for a notice about a particular concert at Wigmore Hall. And there were decisions to make. What to do with Woolf at her most unkind, or snobbish? Olivier devised some basic rules for inclusion: she pinned a piece of paper above her desk that read ACCURACY \/ RELEVANCE \/ CONCISION \/ INTEREST<\/small>. She decided there was little point in upsetting those friends still living, and cut any particularly unflattering descriptions. And Woolf\u2019s Asheham diary\u2014\u201ctoo different in character\u201d from the other diaries, she noted, and \u201ctoo laconic\u201d\u2014didn\u2019t merit publishing in full. The second volume, from the summer of 1918, was omitted completely.<\/p>\n

This summer, Granta has reissued Woolf\u2019s diaries and billed them as \u201cunexpurgated,\u201d a promise that has caused no small stir among Woolf scholars, who had thought Olivier\u2019s editions were complete. The new inclusions are, in fact, mostly minor: a handful of comments about Woolf\u2019s friends, written toward the end of her life, including an unpleasant description of Igor Anrep\u2019s mouth. Otherwise, Olivier\u2019s volume divisions remain unchanged, her notes and indexes intact; it is as much a reproduction, and a celebration, of her scholarly masterpiece as of Woolf\u2019s diaristic eye. The most significant addition is Asheham. For the first time, Woolf\u2019s small diary\u2014the last remaining autobiographical fragment to be published\u2014appears in its entirety. And yet those readers turning to Granta\u2019s edition for details of Woolf\u2019s country life in 1918 must skip to the end of the first volume, and look for her diary beneath the heading \u201cAppendix 3.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Appendixes can be awkward, unwieldy things. They serve a scholarly function\u2014to present information deemed unsuitable for the main body of a text, like an attachment, or an afterthought. And an appendix is an especially odd place for a diary, putting time out of sequence, disrupting the \u201ccurrent\u201d\u2014as Woolf liked to call it\u2014of everyday life. The remaining paragraphs of the Asheham diary have been relegated behind the main text; they sit quietly, unobtrusively, documenting a life as minute and domestic as before. Returning to the house in 1918, Woolf records her days, the winter melting into spring\u2014the last of the diary, and the war. Out on her walks, she sees \u201ca few brown heath butterflies,\u201d the air \u201cswarming with little black beetles.\u201d She spends afternoons on the terrace, the sun hot, \u201chad to wear straw hat,\u201d and in the evening, she and Leonard sit \u201ceating our own broad beans\u2014delicious.\u201d There are more local intrigues: the coal from the cellar goes missing, a mysterious plague kills the farmer\u2019s lambs. Day by day, she watches a caterpillar pupate. The news is better from France. Still, the German prisoners work in the fields. \u201cWhen alone, I smile at the tall German.\u201d But her entries are thinning. By September, there is \u201cnothing to notice\u201d on the Downs, or \u201cnothing new.\u201d Even the butterflies are less brilliant\u2014a few tortoiseshells, some ragged blues. Finally, toward the back of the notebook, she lists the household linen to be washed.<\/p>\n

Her attention had begun shifting elsewhere. In London, she was becoming intensely preoccupied with the Press, and with writing shorter things, impressions and color studies\u2014the pieces that will make up her first book of stories, Monday or Tuesday<\/em>, published in 1921. And yet, if one looks closely, one can see the diary in some of these stories; something like an underpainting.<\/p>\n

Take, for instance, Katherine Mansfield’s visit to Asheham in August 1917. The diary\u2019s summary of Katherine\u2019s visit is brief: her train into Lewes was late, so Woolf bought a bulb for the flowerbed; later, the two writers walked on the terrace together, an airship maneuvering overhead. Yet from letters, we know that the manuscript for Woolf\u2019s \u201cKew Gardens\u201d was almost certainly brought out. In it, we can see the imprint of Asheham, its reversal of scales, its teeming insect life. In the story, which was published in 1919, human life takes place off center, in the murmur of conversation wafting above the flower bed, while the \u201cvast green spaces\u201d of the bed and the snail laboring over his crumbs of earth loom largest of all. The story, though set in Richmond, captures the atmosphere of Asheham. Its form, like the other stories in Monday or Tuesday<\/em>, owes much to the episodic structure of her diary, in which impressions are hazy, words come and go, and attention is both microscopic and abstract. And its authorial presence mirrors the one we find in the notebook\u2014a writer who is both there and not there, looking and noticing.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of 1918, as Woolf\u2019s convalescence comes to an end, so does her Asheham diary. Back in London, she muses on the project she has kept going for two years: \u201cAsheham diary drains off my meticulous observations of flowers, clouds, beetles & the price of eggs,\u201d she writes in her other, longer diary, \u201c&, being alone, there is no other event to record.\u201d It has served its purpose, paving a way back to writing after illness, of nursing her attention back to life. Though it was later forgotten, it always stood for one of her quietest and arguably most important periods, between her first attempts at writing and those fleeting experiments which determined the novels that came afterward. And it continued to be a storehouse for images to be drawn upon later\u2014her nephews, Julian and Quentin Bell, carrying home antlers, like those in the attic nursery in To The Lighthouse<\/em>; a grass snake on the path, like the one Giles Oliver crushes with his tennis shoe in Between the Acts<\/em>; a continuous stream of butterflies and moths.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Harriet<\/span> Baker<\/span> is a British writer. Her work has appeared in the<\/em> London Review of Books,<\/em> the<\/em> Times Literary Supplement,<\/i>\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0Apollo, among others. Her first book,<\/em> Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, will be published by Allen Lane in March 2024.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe diary is a bridge between two periods in her work and also between illness and health, writing and not writing, looking and feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2384,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31215],"tags":[68691,7682,22269,67827,969,7740],"class_list":["post-164703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-books","tag-country-life","tag-diaries","tag-english-country-houses","tag-featured","tag-virginia-woolf","tag-world-war-i"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nVirginia Woolf\u2019s Forgotten Diary by Harriet Baker<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"June 21, 2023 \u2013 \u201cThe diary is a bridge between two periods in her work and also between illness and health, writing and not writing, looking and feeling.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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