When Granta Books reissued Virginia Woolf’s diaries this summer, it advertised them as “unexpurgated for the first time”. I was struck by the word choice. After all, I associate “purging” with the process of writing a diary, not publishing or editing one. Taking up the pen, opening the blank page like a toilet bowl, spilling guts and confidences. The last time Woolf’s diaries were published, between 1977 and 1984, they comprised around 2,000 pages of such intimate disclosures. The latest versions come with new, apparently exciting inclusions. Our eagerness for more reminds us why Woolf’s diaries were always so good in the first place. They had sweep, scope, density, an unsparing garrulousness and self-absorption that, in turn, absorbed us.
This reissue is an apt moment to ask ourselves why, sometime in the past 50 years, we stopped keeping brimming, confessional diaries in the style of Woolf, the ones we like so much, and instead began to keep something fundamentally different, contrived and sterile: journals.
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