Reviews have showcased the formal patterning of material in the column, which constructs, with considerable dexterity, an imagined community among diverse readers. is is, however, a minor concern because the volume’s strength lies in its scrupulous attention to the diversity and range of Bennett’s cultural work. S U R F Virginia Woolf, the War Without, the War Within: Her Final Diaries and the Diaries She Read. By B L. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. . viii+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. Virginia Woolf is read with passion and dedication outside as well as inside the Academy. Her diaries are usually treated as a resource to explore her social, intellectual , and emotional life—the people she met, the books she read, what she thought and felt about events as they happened. To date no one has thought of taking the diaries as objects of study in themselves, and readers from both constituencies will be grateful to Barbara Lounsberry for her pioneering work. is is the final volume of three, which looks at the diaries Woolf wrote between and , and the diaries she read during these years. e increase in the number of these diaries is one of three traits that Lounsberry identifies as distinguishing this final ‘stage’ in Woolf’s diary ‘career’ (pp. –). e second is the increase in the number of entries per year while the third, and perhaps most interesting, is the turn to diary writing in the morning. As Lounsberry argues, this indicates the importance the activity had for Woolf in this long decade of ‘a war within’ that echoes and responds to the emerging ‘war without’. Lounsberry’s division of the diaries into three stages is fully justified and fits neatly with Woolf’s own attraction to tripartite structures (exemplified, for instance, in To the Lighthouse). Attention is drawn to intriguing features, such as the introduction of newspaper headings into the diary of , as well as a wealth of material details such as the colour of the ink used by Woolf and the layout of the pages, which render the diaries vividly present as material objects. Once under way, however, the book tends to ‘plod’, as, Lounsberry suggests, Woolf does in her diary of (p. ). e academic reader at least will regret the absence of a principle of selection among the diaries Woolf read, which are scrupulously given equal treatment, although it is clear that some were a good deal more important to Woolf than others—a relative importance that may be gauged quite simply by the number and specificity of references in letters and essays as well as in the diaries. It is evident, for instance, that the diaries of André Gide (pp. –) and Guy de Maupassant (pp. –) engaged her attention much more than those of Princess Daisy of Pless (pp. –) or Alice James, sister to Henry and William (pp. –). is last is mentioned only in a list of books read by Woolf in October , and, as Lounsberry remarks, Woolf le no further ‘record’ of her reading of it (p. ), in contrast to her reading of Gide and Maupassant, of which there are many traces. Furthermore, for the academic reader there is too little analysis and too much summary—of Woolf’s diaries and the diaries she read—although the difficulty of MLR, ., the task should not be underestimated since many of these diaries will be unfamiliar to readers inside as well outside the Academy. In addition, there is too much speculation as to what Woolf might have felt or thought as she read, and what she might have ‘got’ from the diaries she was reading. Undoubtedly, Woolf’s capacious mind absorbed much from what she read but to reduce her reading of others’ diaries to what she ‘got’ from them is to impoverish her (indeed any) reading experience, surely motivated by curiosity about lives and the writing of those lives, different from as much as they are like one’s own. e approach tends towards tunnel vision, producing links or connections that a reader conscious of the multifarious cultural and social contexts of Woolf’s writing will find implausible. In her second volume, for instance, Lounsberry proposed that A Room of...