2012 Reprint of 1953 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. An invaluable guide to the art and mind of Virginia Woolf, "A Writer's Diary" was collected by her husband from the personal record she kept over a period of twenty-seven years. Included are entries that refer to her own writing and those that are clearly writing exercises, accounts of people and scenes relevant to the raw material of her work, and finally, comments on books she was reading. The first entry is dated 1918 and the last, three weeks before her death in 1941. Between these points of time unfolds the private world - the anguish, the triumph, the creative vision - of one of the great writers of our century.

“Nothing yet published about her so totally contradicts the legend of Virginia Woolf.... [This] is a first chance to meet the writer in her own unguarded words and to observe the root impulses of her art without the distractions of a commentary” (New York Times). Edited and with a Preface by Anne Olivier Bell; Introduction by Quentin Bell; Index.

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.

Virginia Woolf turned to her diary as to an intimate friend, to whom she could freely and spontaneously confide her thoughts on public events or the joys and trials of domestic life. Between 1st January 1915 and her death in 1941 she regularly recorded he

Choice Outstanding Academic Title In her third and final volume on Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Barbara Lounsberry reveals new insights about the courageous last years of the modernist writer’s life, from 1929 until Woolf’s suicide in 1941. Woolf turned more to her diary—and to the diaries of others—for support in these years as she engaged in inner artistic wars, including the struggle with her most difficult work, The Waves, and as the threat of fascism in the world outside culminated in World War II. During this period, the war began to bleed into Woolf’s diary entries. Woolf writes about Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin; copies down the headlines of the day; and captures how war changed her daily life. Alongside Woolf’s own entries, Lounsberry explores the diaries of 18 other writers as Woolf read them, including the diaries of Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Wordsworth, Guy de Maupassant, Alice James, and André Gide. Lounsberry shows how reading diaries was both respite from Woolf’s public writing and also an inspiration for it. Tellingly, shortly before her suicide Woolf had stopped reading them completely. The outer war and Woolf’s inner life collide in this dramatic conclusion to the trilogy that resoundingly demonstrates why Virginia Woolf has been called “the Shakespeare of the diary.” Lounsberry’s masterful study is essential reading for a complete understanding of this extraordinary writer and thinker and the development of modernist literature.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title In this second volume of her acclaimed study of Virginia Woolf 's diaries, Barbara Lounsberry traces the English writer's life through the thirteen diaries she kept from 1918 to 1929--what is often considered Woolf’s modernist "golden age." During these interwar years, Woolf penned many of her most famous works, including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and A Room of One's Own. Lounsberry shows how Woolf's writing at this time was influenced by other diarists--Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Jonathan Swift, and Stendhal among them--and how she continued to use her diaries as a way to experiment with form and as a practice ground for her evolving modernist style. Through close readings of Woolf 's journaling style and an examination of the diaries she read, Lounsberry tracks Woolf 's development as a writer and unearths new connections between her professional writing, personal writing, and the diaries she was reading at the time. Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path offers a new approach to Woolf 's biography: her life as she marked it in her diary from ages 36 to 46.