Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read

by Barbara Lounsberry

“Explores the history of Woolf's diaries, not only to reveal heretofore unremarked sources but also to trace her evolving sense of possibilities in diary-writing, possibilities which helped shape Woolf as a fiction writer. A must-read for devotees of Virginia Woolf.”—Panthea Reid, author of Art and A Life of Virginia Woolf “This revealing book gives us a diarist with greater literary range than Pepys and affords us a second the infinitely varied voices of the diaries Virginia read. They fascinate us as they fascinate those writers who encouraged, warned, comforted, and trained a developing genius.”—Nancy Price, author of Sleeping with the Enemy “Lounsberry’s deeply researched and gracefully written book shows not only Woolf’s development into a great diarist but also her evolvement into the fiction and nonfiction writer revered today.”—Gay Talese, author of A Writer’s Life Encompassing thirty-eight handwritten volumes, Virginia Woolf’s diary is her lengthiest and longest-sustained work—and her last to reach the public. In the only full-length book to explore deeply this luminous and boundary-stretching masterpiece, Barbara Lounsberry traces Woolf’s development as a writer through her first twelve diaries—a fascinating experimental stage, where the earliest hints of Woolf’s pioneering modernist style can be seen.
Starting with fourteen-year-old Woolf’s first palm-sized leather diary, Becoming Virginia Woolf illuminates how her private and public writing was shaped by the diaries of other writers including Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, the French Goncourt brothers, Mary Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Woolf’s “diary parents”—Sir Walter Scott and Fanny Burney. These key literary connections open a new and indispensable window onto the story of one of literature’s most renowned modernists. 

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virginia Woolf’s posthumously published diaries are often—and rightly—considered among the major achievements of the form, with her biographer and nephew Quentin Bell unabashedly declaring them “one of the great diaries of the world.” But those now-classic examples of life writing, covering the years 1915 until 1941, are actually not what Lounsberry is concerned with in this study; instead she turns her attention to the diaries the young Woolf kept beginning in 1897 when she was merely fourteen years old. There are twelve early diaries in all, and beyond their obvious biographical interest, Lounsberry discovers within them a complex self-portrait of restless young talent eager to experiment and hone her craft as an aspiring author—first a reviewer and essayist, eventually as a writer of fiction as well.

This study considers the early diaries in strict chronological order, always keeping a keen eye on not just what they record, but how. Lounsberry very persuasively demonstrates that from the very beginning Woolf was fascinated by the diary as a form of literary expression, keenly attuned to the possibilities they provided to experiment in private. Very quickly the young writer came to regard her diary writing as a self-described “compost heap,” providing rich, raw material through which to cultivate work intended for publication and public consumption. Judiciously selected excerpts from the various diaries demonstrate that in many ways the “stream of consciousness” style for which she would go on to pioneer was beginning to take form in these pages as Woolf strains to capture and record the rapid movements of her restless, mercurial mind. It’s dazzling to witness, even via secondary analysis.

The other aspect of Lounsberry’s stated project—a consideration of how Woolf was influenced by the diaries she herself read and studied—was what elevated this study from the interesting to the invaluable; indeed, Lounsberry goes so far as to make the staggering claim that “Woolf was more steeped in diary literature than any other well-known diarist before her—and likely even since.” It can be confirmed that she read at least 66 of them, though she undoubtedly read many, many more. Lounsberry carefully traces how aspects of these many other texts made their way into Woolf’s own diary keeping, sometimes deliberately, other times in much more covert, unexpected ways.

As someone who has kept private journals since a young age and loves to read published examples of the form, Lounsberry’s study was from the get-go of specific interest to me. Beyond convincing me to return to Woolf’s own diaries, I now have a whole list of other diaries I’m now eager to explore, ranging from the perennial classics by Samuel Pepys, Samuel Johnson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the celebrated life writing by the Goncourts and Fanny Burney, and on down to more obscure entries by Stopford Brooke, William Allingham, and the dictated journals of Lady Hester Stanhope. In other words, while I found the analysis and description of Woolf’s diaries and a glimpse into her development as a writer more than engrossing in and of themselves, perhaps more importantly I also managed to discover a dimension of my favorite author’s work and artistic practice that deeply synchronizes with my own, providing more avenues to explore my own development as a writer and diary keeper.

[Sara Jesus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quando escrevemos um diário guardamos os nossos desejos e sonhos mais secretos. Escrevemos com o intuito de desabafar ou de preservar as nossas memórias mais preciosas. Mas existem diários demasiado valiosos para ficarem apenas numa gaveta, o mais conhecido é "O diário de Anne Frank".

Virgínia Woolf era uma mulher extraordinária, que ofereceu ao mundo uma obra vastíssima. O seu diário, ao contrário da sua maioria, demonstra muito mais do que seu quotidiano. Revela-nos a genialidade da sua escrita e a sua identidade feminista.

Ao ler este livro deslumbrei-me ainda mais com Woolf. Uma mulher a frente do seu tempo que viveu em sofrimento. Não deixo de salientar a sua coragem para ser realmente autentica, num tempo em que o domínio masculino dominava.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barbara Lounsberry was my thesis advisor, and her meticulous working style and love of the diary form shine through in this engrossing work.

This gave me a new appreciation of diaries just as I was on the point of throwing out all of mine from third grade on (there's never going to be a Museum of Me, who cares?). I am not Virginia Woolf, so my diaries won't chronicle my journey to leadership of a literary era. But perhaps they have more value (potentially even just to me) than I currently see, so I found a way to consolidate the boxes to save space.

Turns out both Woolf and Boswell kept reading notebooks (hello, Goodreads). Lounsberry validates the notion of a periodic diary -- that there are different _kinds_ of diaries, some daily, some periodic, some travel, some work-related -- and I had never thought about this, despite the fact that for years I have kept both a daily family diary (one that is shared, not at creation but later, as each year we select one volume (they cover 3-5 years) and read the entries for that day in previous years at supper) as well as writing/personal journal diaries, and recently even a work diary. So to have permission for intermittent or periodic writing was lovely.

For some reason I just loved the way Lounsberry summarized the value of the diary for Woolf herself: "The 1904-5 diary is an important volume biographically. Its single-minded focus revelas the intensity of the emerging writer's drive for success. 'I want to work like a steam engine,' Virginia writes Violet Dickinson in early January 1905, and she does (L #206, 1:172). The diary records her accumulating lessons as a professional writer: the risks of exceeding one's word-limit and being insensitively edited ("I shant waste words again!" PA 251) . . . . We see a writer learning to protect her time ("really I must find some way of doing these lecture jobs at other times -- mornings are too precious' (PA 237); and one wishing, even as she starts, to write free of editors' demands." (80).

Lady Charlotte Bury's _Diary of a Lady in Waiting_ includes a letter from a woman writer to Bury regarding the difficulties of publication: "When I spoke of Lady [--------]'s name as being worth thousands in itself, he shook his head, and replied that it would indeed excite a strong sensation, and cause a temporary run upon the book; but that was not enough; unless it was likely to become a standard one it was impossible to give a large sum for it." Ferrier writes to Bury that "I confess I have heard so much of the ways of booksellers and publishers lately, that I find a nameless author has no chance of making anything of the business, and am quite dispirited from continuing to finish my story, and very much doubt if it will see the light of day" (2:177). (111).

Lounsberry shows how Woolf transmutes the diaries she reads into her own literary material. Writing about Dr. Charles Meryon's Diaries celebrating Lady Hester Stanhope. "In the final years of her life, when a petty British government witholds her pension due to minor claims of debts, she writes to Queen Victoria: 'I shall not allow the pension given by your royal grandfather to be stopped by force; but I shall resign it for the payment of my debts, and with it the name of English subject, and the slavery that is at present annexed to it' (Memoirs 2:267). In this regard, too, Lady Hester foreshadows Woolf's immortal words in _Three Guineas_: "as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

Mary Berry's journals celebrate other women writers, especially the difficulty of writing about private versus public persons: "The biographers of those who have been distinguished in the active paths of life, who have directed the councils or fought the battles of nations, have, perhaps an easier task than those who engage to satisfy the curiosity sometimes excited by persons whose situation, circumstances, or sex, have confined them to private life. To the biographers of public characters, the pages of history and the archives of the state furnish many of the documents required; while those of private individuals have to collect every particular from accidental materials, from combining and comparing letters, and otherwise insignificant papers, never intended to convey any part of the information sought in them." (179)

"I think one day I shall write a book of Eccentrics. Mrs. Grote shall be one. Lady hester Stanhope. Margaret Fuller. Duchess of Newcastle. Aunt Julia [Margaret Cameron]." "She fulfills this vow, not with a book but with an article claled "The Eccentrics" in the April 1919 Athenaeum."

[Mary Kenyon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look at Virginia Woolf's diaries. Well-researched.

[Elisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful and interesting addition to Woolf scholarship which analyzes Woolf’s own creation of herself as a writer in the succession of twelve diaries she literally made (she was a skilled though amateur book-binder) and wrote in from the age of fifteen in 1897 to the age of thirty-six in 1918. Lounsberry also carefully discusses the possible influences and affiliations the developing writer felt with fifteen key diaries she read during that time. A must-read for serious Woolf scholars as well as curious common readers.

[Mills College Library]

Biog W9128Lo 2014