In the summer of 1926, Virginia Woolf sat at her desk at Monk’s House, Sussex, opened her diary, and wrote: “I shall here write the first pages of the greatest book in the world.” She was 44 years old, the famed author of Mrs Dalloway, out of London for the season. The document that follows breaks the chronological form of her diaries so far – dates are swapped for headings such as “Art & Thought” and “My Own Brain”. The greatest book in the world, Woolf writes, would be “made entirely solely & with integrity of one’s thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they became ‘works of art.’? Catch them hot & sudden as they rise in the mind – walking up Asheham hill for instance.” No sooner has she begun than she sees the impossibility of her task. “Of course one cannot; for the process of language is slow & deluding. One must stop to find a word; then, there is the form of the sentence, soliciting one to fill it.”
These are the contradictions and ambivalences that animate The Diary of Virginia Woolf – a sprawling, vivid, living document that contains more than half a million words written over 27 years. Woolf wrote in the mornings or in the hour before tea; she wrote at her desk, laid up ill in bed, wedged into a window; she wrote when surging with self-confidence (“a Rolls Royce engine once more purring its 70 miles an hour in my brain”) and when trembling with anxiety (“so I’m found out & that odious rice pudding of a book is what I thought it – a dank failure”). She wrote in snatches of time, before breaking off, interrupted by life, visitors – dinner! She announces again and again that these are mere scribbles, not real writing, you’d have to turn to the novels for that. But reading her diary feels as if you have been ushered up the back stairs to a private encounter with a great work of art, only to find that the artist – paint-splattered, blinking – is there too, finishing the picture as you watch. And is that you, there, now appearing in the corner of the canvas?
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