Barbara Lounsberry. Virginia Woolf, the War Without, the War Within: Her Final Diaries and the Diaries She Read

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, I was a young scholar writing a book on modernist literary diaries, which includes a chapter on Virginia Woolf. Woolf kept a diary, with a few interruptions, from the time she was a teenager in 1897 until 4 days before her suicide on 28 March 1941. These diaries have all been published: A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals (1990) documents Woolf’s years from 1897 to 1909; the five-volume series The Diary of Virginia Woolf (1977–1984) extends the life narrative from 1915 to 1941. My project was predicated on viewing original manuscripts, as I was analysing not only the content of the diaries but also how they were constructed as individual, aesthetic books. I made the journey from my home in Toronto to the New York Public Library, where Woolf’s archival trove is part of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. In a tightly secured reading room, I was given access to 36 volumes of Woolf’s holograph diaries; one other volume is held at the British Library, which I also visited.