Hitler Darkens the Waters

Abstract

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.