A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf – review

This collation of Virginia Woolf's thoughts on her writing provides a fascinating insight into her work and the workings of her mind

Anita Sethi

Sunday 30 December 2012

"G

reetings! my dear ghost," Virginia Woolf addresses her older self whom she imagines might one day read the diary entry she is writing. The pages are haunted with such hypothetical selves but also with her fictional characters as they are brought into being, from imagination to printed page. It was her husband Leonard Woolf's aim in publishing A Writer's Diary, he explains in the preface, to distil from his wife's26 volumes of diaries "everything which referred to her own writing", so giving "an unusual psychological picture of artistic production from within". First published in 1953, here reissued with an engaging preface from Lyndall Gordon, it chronicles the period from 1918 to Woolf's final entry four days before her suicide in 1941.

The nuts and bolts of the creative process are thrillingly exposed, from writing to "architecturing" and redrafting now classic books including To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own, and The Waves. How to find a form to capture thought, feeling and the flux of time is a question Woolf tackled so innovatively throughout her work and her diary enabled her to experiment freely. Her engrossing diary's "rapid haphazard gallop" sweeps up "the diamonds of the dustheap" of daily life, sketching with sparkling insights the external world: meetings with the Bloomsbury group; "owling through the streets" in her night walks; sheltering from air raids as the war begins, leaving her unmoored as she sees "tortured London" become "a desolate ruin".

"I live in intensity," she writes, and this is a fascinating journey not only through her contemporary milieu but through extreme emotional terrain, "the mind's adventure", reflecting the ebb and flow of her moods, "so divinely happy one day; so jaded the next", moving from the "ardour and lust of creation" to collapses into exhaustion and illness. She writes poignantly that "this trough of despair shall not, I swear, engulf me".

We see her summoning the courage as a woman to be "writing against the current". Indeed, water imagery ripples throughout: one day, she is "sunk fathoms deep" in a "wash of reflection", another day trying to keep afloat in a "great lake of melancholy"; writing Mrs Dalloway "seems to leave me plunged deep into the richest strata of my mind" – and it is the power of the human mind in all the pleasure and pain of creation that is captured so eloquently in these pages.

THE GUARDIAN