Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read by Barbara Lounsberry (review)

Abstract

The major published diaries of Virginia Woolf come in neatly sequenced books: first the five authoritative volumes scrupulously transcribed and edited by Anne Olivier Bell and, after the first volume, also by Andrew McNeillie, published in the 1970s and ’80s and covering the period of 1915 to Woolf ’s death in 1941; and then The Passionate Apprentice (1990), edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, which contains Woolf ’s early journals from 1897 to 1909. The division this has set up between Woolf ’s “early” (pre-1915) and “mature” (1915 and after) diaries, and the separations between diary years in each of the first five volumes published, map well onto Woolf ’s life and professional career, and have inevitably and understandably come to guide readers’ mental conception of Woolf ’s development. The early diaries show Woolf prior to her becoming a published novelist; 1915 marks the year of publication for her first novel, The Voyage Out, and also fittingly marks the year in which Woolf ’s diary entries resume after a mysterious five-year diary blank. Becoming Virginia Woolf, however, questions these facile divisions. Barbara Lounsberry uses her own categorization system: Woolf ’s early diaries from 1897 to mid-1918, where Woolf tested the waters and Reviews