The Writer's Diary as Borderland: The Public and Private Selves of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Louisa May Alcott

Abstract

‘It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes and work at certain effects. I daresay I practised Jacob here; and Mrs D and shall invent my next book here …’ So wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary in 1924. In this essay I extend Woolf's idea of a writer's journal as a practice ground to that of a borderland mediating the public and private identities of the three women whose diaries I examine here: Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Louisa May Alcott. In the major fictions of all three writers, moreover, we encounter multiple images of both mirrors and windows, open and closed. Emily Dalgarno has argued that for Woolf, this motif is linked to a childhood trauma that Woolf recounted in ‘A Sketch of the Past’. In ‘Sketch’, Woolf writes of the ‘small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House’ and the ‘looking glass-shame’ she continued to feel as an adult, and connects this shame to being molested as a ‘very small’ child by her much older stepbrother in front of that hallway mirror. Dalgarno posits that this event constitutes the primal source for mirror tropes in Woolf's fiction. In this essay, I suggest that by exploring the diaries that all three writers kept throughout their lives, we may likewise find a context for understanding their repetitive use of these key images of self-perception, subjectivity and familial identity. The diaries of Woolf, Mansfield and Alcott, I argue, functioned both as the mirrors that reflected, and the windows that framed, or offered escape from, the split-voiced selves of the writers that composed them, and thus offer readers a unique glimpse of creativity in action.