Misguided General

Hitler takes his first prize, the Rhineland, unopposed in March 1936. Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf fights her own dramatic inner war across that year. Her 1936 diary reveals, more clearly than any other of her diaries, the diary's foundational role in Woolf's artistic renewal—a role she does not fully understand. With great clarity, we also see the role of other diaries in her renewals in 1936. In August 1936, amid a dangerous illness, Woolf reads the diaries of Bertrand Russell's parents, Lord and Lady Amberley. She lives again in their world and takes direction for Three Guineas. In early November, she reads Ellen Weeton's Journal of a Governess, and, in December, the diaries of Stephen MacKenna, who translated the Greek philosopher Plotinus into a melodious English. She also makes use of these diaries as she writes Three Guineas.

Warnings

“By the summer of 1934,” Hermione Lee writes, Hitler's “ambitions and his methods were fully apparent.” In the mid-1930s, Nazis issue regulations to eliminate women doctors and lawyers in Germany. German universities reduce the female quota of students to just ten percent. On October 28, 1934, Oswald Mosley stages a vicious attack on Jews during a British Union of Fascists rally at the Royal Albert Hall. Beyond these alarming national and international threats, Woolf faces inner personal (and artistic) loss and outer public attack, as she writes in her diary. She starts to speak of “warnings” in this journal. However, André Gide’s Pages de Journal, 1929–32 give her new direction in August 1934. In September, Guy de Maupassant's travel diary Sur l’eau (Afloat) particularly helps her to navigate through Roger Fry's unexpected death. She both enters its words in her diary and uses Afloat for a key moment in her novel The Years. In October, Alice James's Journal helps Woolf calibrate British women's social and sexual lives in the first decades of The Years and shows her—as do Gide's and Maupassant's diaries—a fierce fight, both without and within, between constraint and freedom.

Adept Sailing before the Storm

Woolf's next two diary books, her 1932 diary and her 1933–34 diary, help her to navigate the difficult strait between the outer and the inner conflicts. She needs these diaries’ support, for, as the gathering outer storm forms, she faces both the strains of her inner artistic self and the loss of her friends. In late November of 1933, she consciously turns from the troubling outer world to the dual-voiced diary of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the aunt and niece verse dramatists who published together under the name Michael Field. There, she finds not only lesbian playwrights and their trials but also the word “outsiders.” In February 1934, her response to a famous travel diary—Arthur Young’s Travels in France during the years 1787, 1788, 1789—shows her recoil from war.

The March of Headlines

Virginia Woolf's “curious props”—including her diary and others’ diaries—ably support her across 1931. She shows, in fact, such sure life command that she mocks the outer political scene in September of 1931. Meanwhile, she continues to add newspaper headlines to her 1930–1931 diary, and her inner wars persist. This chapter shows how Woolf used her 1930–1931 diary as a practice field for The Waves. Other diaries also aid her. In December 1930, she makes double use of The Journal of a Somerset Rector, with its tale of a country suicide. First, she summarizes John Skinner's Journal in her diary to test her ability to write and then she revises the diary entry for her Second Common Reader essay “The Rev. John Skinner” (1932). She finds James Woodforde's Diary of a Country Parson further proof of life deathless in a diary and pairs him with John Skinner in the Second Common Reader. In May 1931, The Private Diaries of Princess Daisy of Pless—Vita Sackville-West's distant relative—offers Woolf rich matter for future works: for Flush, The Years, and Three Guineas.

War Shades Life & Work

Though Woolf opposed the darkened waters of the dictators in 1938, in 1939, as the war edges closer, she can’t avoid letting it shade her life and work. On March 22, Madrid “surrender[s]” to the fascists (D 5: 211). The week before, Hitler marches into Prague and proclaims (Woolf writes) that “Czecko-Slovakia has ceased to exist).” Although Woolf's fluidity is affected, she remains bold. In January, she dons the mask of Cleopatra (perhaps ominously) for her brother Adrian's costume party. Using diary form, she starts her memoirs in April. And she continues her inner artistic struggle to resurrect Roger Fry. Across the year, she also seeks life enduring through her own diary—and in many other diaries as well. Some diarists aid her—like her diary-father, Sir Walter Scott. In January, Woolf wishes to also write on the remarkable journals of French painter Eugène Delacroix. However, in August, she finds, in F. L. Lucas's Journal Under the Terror, 1938, an invitation to noble suicide. In the Journals of Charles Ricketts, R. A., the brilliant outsider and friend of Michael Field, which she reads in late December, she meets a diary stopped by war.

Hitler Darkens the Waters

By 1938, Hitler “had taken over and was dictating the narrative of European history,” Rosenfeld notes. Virginia Woolf's books—including her diary—offer a counter narrative. In March, as Hitler marches into Austria, Woolf finishes Three Guineas. Through her acute sensitivity, she captures the precise world state with a haunting diary image: Hitler and Stalin are “like drops of dirty water mixing” (D 5: 129). Her challenge from 1938 onwards becomes how to keep moving—how to escape being drawn into the mud. In August, as the world waits, suspended, as Hitler pauses at Czechoslovakia’s door, she takes heart from the newly found Diary of the Reverend Francis Kilvert, the Victorian vicar (and poet) from the river Wye. His diary's “gipsy beauty” lives again in the character Mrs. Manresa in Woolf's final novel Between the Acts—as do his amusing cows. Kilvert gives Woolf a lush natural human voice amid the welter of war.

Epilogue

Virginia Woolf's third and final diary stage records the ever-nearing wars without that assailed her (and finally surrounded her) and her (artistic) wars within as she sought to address the outer world’s state in a constructive and creative way. In her last dozen years, Woolf's diaries served as a vital tool in her fight against fascism, its tyranny and wars. To understand this is to probe the political implications of genre. A diary's very “ordinariness” works to counter fascism's false, hysterical melodrama. A diary's “prosaic discontinuities” both deflate and defuse the dictators' pumped-up play. Her complex diary portraits further challenge the fascist fantasy of villains and heroes. Woolf's diary is her last major work to reach the public. In this book, I have sought to reveal the foundational role this semi-private diary served for Woolf's public works and for her artistic renewal. Indeed, I believe that her published fiction and nonfiction would not exist without her diary. Among voracious readers, Woolf may be unique in her appreciation of the treasures hidden in diaries. In others' diaries, Woolf sought not only the natural human voice but also the life traces beyond her own, especially ones that she could transform into art. In the end, a diary becomes a perfect image for Virginia Woolf: fragile yet resilient, it is always subject to movement, is rich in renewal, and is inevitably subject to death—and yet, it is deathless as well.

Encircled by War

Territorial trespass and attack intensify in the years covered in Virginia Woolf's two final diary books: the 109-entry of her 1940 diary and the 10-entry of her 1941 diary. In April of 1940, Germany invades Norway and Denmark. In May, the neutral states of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg fall. In June, Hitler's storm troopers parade up Paris's Champs-Élysées. Only England now remains. On July 19, Hitler asks England to surrender. In August, he orders a total blockade of Great Britain and begins a night-time bombing assault—the London Blitz. To counter, Woolf aims for a weightier diary in 1940, poignantly an evening diary for “Old Virginia.” As these last two diaries movingly show, Virginia Woolf fights on both in her public works and in her diary. Surrounded now and cut off, she holds on until she can fight no more, dying from suicide in March of 1941.

Storm-Tossed & Exposed

In February 1937, Virginia Woolf's nephew, Julian Bell, says he will enlist to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. In July 1937, war erupts between China and Japan. These outer storms, now reaching Woolf's own family circle, darken her own (deserved) high sail. America's Time magazine features Woolf on its cover, a sign of international literary fame. Due mostly to the success of The Years, Hogarth Press’ 1937 profits are unprecedented. Yet, so tossed and exposed is Woolf by the outer crises around her that she cannot savor her success. In February 1937, she reads The Final Struggle: Being Countess Tolstoy’s Diary for 1910 with Extracts from Leo Tolstoy’s Diary of the same period. She sees her own anguish in the final diaries of Leo Tolstoy and his wife. She finds there not only inner and outer wars (recorded in many diaries) but also a war fought over diaries as well.

The War Within

Chapter 1 begins with a swift summary of fascism's rise in both England and Germany from 1929 to 1931: or what I call “the war without.” It then notes Woolf's response, including her scrapbooks, which collected articles on tyranny and war. As Woolf seeks out a bound diary book in June 1929 and embarks on her third and final diary stage, her mind also turns inward to the lonely artistic battle she foresees with The Waves. Both her diary and that novel reveal what she will further argue in Three Guineas: that the private and the public are inseparably linked. In October of 1929, Woolf publishes a tribute to “Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals,” a vivid illustration of her ability to choose diaries and to find in them just what she needs to assist her public prose.