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"I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun." 

—Virginia Woolf

A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf.    Culled by her husband Leonard, this selection from Virginia Woolf's extensive series of diaries deal primarily with her life as a writer. Here are the day to day thoughts, highs and lows, hopes and fears that anyone who writes with any degree of seriousness will immediately recognize. The selections stretch over a good part of the most productive years of Woolf's literary career, from 1918, when Woolf was 36, to 1941, the year she threw herself into a river, her pockets stuffed with stones, drowning at the age of 59.

On September 30th, 1926, she writes: "Life is, soberly and accurately, the oddest affair; has in it the essence of reality. I used to feel this as a child—couldn't step across a puddle once, I remember, for thinking how strange—what am I?, etc. But by writing I don't reach anything. All I mean to make is a note of a curious state of mind."

"By writing I don't reach anything." What?! Can she really mean this? What an unusual thing for a writer to say. Yet, it is a key statement in understanding Woolf's work, as is the sentence that follows: "All I mean to make is a note of a curious state of mind." If you read Woolf with these two statements as your guide, the supposed "difficulty" and obscurity of her books evaporates and understanding and appreciation blossoms.

Nonetheless, Woolf herself is alternately euphoric about her work and thrown into depressive uncertainty about it's ultimate significance. One day she considers her unique style as an important literary innovation; the next day she fears it  may be nothing more than the symptom of a sterile, eccentric solipsism. She nervously awaits the first reviews of a newly published book and, when they are positive, she can't help but feel like she's walking on stars. When they are negative or lukewarm, she defiantly asserts that she doesn't care what anyone thinks, good or bad. Such extreme bipolar vacillations are commonplace, all-too-familiar to any writer, a psychic form of protective armoring, but who would have thought they were also experienced by an author of Woolf's caliber? If nothing else, Woolf's diary illustrates what hell it is to be a writer.

Woolf recounts her meetings and relationships with other famous authors, such as E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Lytton Strachey. She offers her considered opinion of the merits and demerits of some of the greatest literary figures of her time, including James Joyce (mixed), Henry James (also mixed), and D.H. Lawrence (too preachy). Of the writers before her time: she idolizes Shakespeare, admires Milton, thinks Byron a greater prose writer than a poet. She shows herself to be constantly estimating her own place in the pantheon of 20th century literature; ever-cognizant of her legacy, she is writing not so much for her ostensible audience, but for the ages. At 42, she is already sharply conscious of her mortality, how much time is left her, and how many books she might be able to finish in the years remaining.

One of the greatest treats of this book is the peek it offers into Woolf's mind and her method of creation. Throughout the diary there are references, almost amounting to working notes, of the books she is writing at the time, or plans to write. So we get glimpses of Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, and The Waves  while they are still nothing more than a gleam in their creator's eye. We see Woolf figuring out how to write what will eventually become masterpieces. We are witness to the "mess" of creation out of which such majestic literary classics emerge. As she frets and fulminates, you want to reach through the page to comfort her, to allay her fears, to reassure her that it's all going to turn out just great in the end. After all, you've already read the finished book; you are the audience a century into the future who she was one day hoping would still be reading her books.

On Saturday, February 18th, 1922, she writes: "I have made up my mind that I'm not going to be popular, and so genuinely that I look upon disregard or abuse as part of my bargain...My only interest as a writer lies, I begin to see, in some queer individualism; not in strength, or passion, or anything startling, but then I say to myself, is not 'some queer individuality' precisely the quality I respect?'"

Well, she turns out to be rather prophetic in this regard. She was famous in her time, at least among the literati, at least as a "woman writer," the latter qualifying designation grating at her as you would expect it to, but she never would become what you'd call a "popular" writer. She isn't a popular writer today either. She is, instead, something far more important. She is an essential writer, a pioneer of consciousness, a writer's writer, an artist who altered the course of literary history and changed many of the accepted notions of what a novel can do. 

At one point, she projects forward to the kind of "novel" she would like someday to write; in fact, she speculates whether there might be some more accurate word to describe what she has in mind than 'novel': 

On Tuesday, November 23, 1926, she writes: "I am now and then haunted by some semi-mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told on one occasion; and time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident—say the fall of a flower—might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist—nor time either."

One might say that the above "mission statement" is as apt a description as any of Woolf's oeuvre. She isn't writing stories so much as texts that delineate the movement—waves, if you will—of consciousness. The "plot" of her books is the movement of perception and reflection, the "drama" is derived and consists in following the journey of a mind as it discovers and uncovers its own workings in the world.

When reading the private thoughts of someone of such elevated intelligence as a Virginia Woolf, I often find myself wondering if they go through the same sort of personal insecurities and inanities that fill up so many pages of my own diary. You know, the obsessive list-making of shortcomings, the panegyrics of self-abuse, the obsessively repetitive passages that begin with variations of such phrases as "I can't believe I ate so much yesterday; I feel like a complete pig." "What's the matter with me? Why can't I keep my mouth shut? I sounded like an utter fool at the party last night. If I only had the guts, I'd stitch my lips together or better yet grab a pair of pinking shears and cut my stupid tongue out once and for all!" etc. Somehow you can't imagine that great minds spend any time at all dwelling on such self-pitying tirades and trivialities. 

In Woolf's diary, however, I was comforted to some degree that even she, great intellect and supreme literary artist that she was, at least occasionally, felt ugly, old, tired, and boring. That she sometimes, even more than sometimes, considered herself poor company, self-absorbed, overly eccentric, prickly, indifferent, moody, dreamy, insufficiently concerned with others. She even thought herself too talkative sometimes. To correct these and other perceived ego faults, Woolf offers herself a corrective antidote.


On Thursday, December 22nd, 1927 she writes: "To forget one's own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practice anonymity. Silence in company; or the quietist statement, not the showiest; is also "medicated" as the doctors say." 

All the ills that flesh and mind are heir to, Woolf is, too. She worries about money, taking time out from her serious work, to write book reviews and books of literary criticism ostensibly to supplement the Woolf household income, but more importantly, if only symbolically, to have money of her own, which, as a woman of that time, she considers an essential step towards independence. She suffers from palpitations and tremors, fainting spells and headaches that lay her out for innumerable "fortnights." She stays in bed a lot, recuperating from colds and influenza and from what sounds like nervous exhaustion. She's a lifelong depressive, always trying to keep one step ahead of the cold shadow that dogs her,  the dark undertow of nihilism that threatens to drag her under the surface the moment she stops swimming. 

On Sunday June 23rd, 1929 she writes with eerie prescience: "I pitched into my great lake of melancholy. Lord how deep it is! What a born melancholic I am! The only way I keep afloat is by working. A note for the summer—I must take more work than I can possibly get done. —No, I don't what it comes from. Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth. That is the only mitigation; a kind of nobility. Solemnity. I shall make myself face the fact that there is nothing—nothing for any of us. Work, reading, writing are all disguises; and relations with people. Yes, even having children would be useless."

In the end, she would tire of constantly swimming against the current of her depression. Her marriage to Leonard Woolf, which was, by most accounts, including her own, a happy and harmonious one, her writing, her reading, all the things for which she lived, would not be enough. On March 28, 1941, something in the river Ouse called to her, something we can presume had called to her before, and she resisted. On this day, for reasons best known only to herself, or, maybe even more likely, for no "reason" at all, she decided it was time and she answered. 

What she left behind was something of more value than what most of us leave behind no matter how long we tarry on the banks of life. She spent her time here wisely. I would like to think she jumped back into the stream of oblivion from which she came knowing that. 

"I will not be 'famous,' 'great.' I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not to be impeded."

—Virginia Woolf, Sunday, October 29th, 1933