Encompassing thirty-eight handwritten volumes, Virginia Woolf’s diary is her longest work, her longest sustained, and last work to reach the public. In the only full-length work 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.

Despite Charlotte Brontë's entreaty to her lifelong friend Ellen Nussey to burn her correspondence, very little seems to have been destroyed, and in this fully annotated edition, based as far as possible on original manuscripts, many confidential and outspoken letters are published in full for the first time. As well as Charlotte's own letters from 1829 to 1847, a handful of important letters and diary extracts by her friends and family illuminate the writer's correspondence. This volume covers the period from her childhood up to the publication and review of Jane Eyre.