Review: Edward Mendelson on a new edition of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries

Virginia Woolf envisioned a diary that “coalesced” into something ”composed with the aloofness of a work of art.“ Have we done it justice?

The Diary of Virginia Woolf is a masterwork unlike anything else written by anyone in the past five centuries: the journal kept for twenty-five years as Virginia Woolf, with intense and unrestrained literary and moral intelligence, observes herself, her work, her marriage, family, and friends, and the wider worlds of nature, literature, politics, and war. Four years after she began it, she asked herself:
What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, & yet steady, tranquil composed with the aloofness of a work of art.

This, from 1915 through 1941, she triumphantly achieved.

Writing at full speed, with no second thoughts or corrections, she records feelings and perceptions as acute as anything in her fiction. As in her novels, she values her aesthetic responses to the world while insisting on their moral and political resonance. Walking by the Thames in 1939, a few days after recording the end of the Spanish Civil War, she experiences
a rat-haunted, riverine place, great chains, wooden pillars, green slime, bricks corroded, a button hook thrown up by the tide. A bitter cold wind. Thought of the refugees from Barcelona walking 40 miles, one with a baby in a parcel.

Elsewhere, she writes about Milton in Paradise Lost, incidentally stating a credo about literature and its uses:
He deals in horror & immensity & squalor & sublimity, but never in the passions of the human heart. Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon ones own joys & sorrows? I get no help in judging life; I scarcely feel that Milton lived or knew men & women; except for the peevish personalities about marriage & the woman’s duties.

She writes about her marriage:
I daresay we’re the happiest couple in England.

About discovering her intentions in the act of revising:
I begin to re-write it [The Waves], & conceive it again with ardour, directly I have done. I begin to see what I had in my mind; & want to begin cutting out masses of irrelevance, & clearing, sharpening & making the good phrases shine.

About interfering with others for the others’ own good:
the peculiar repulsiveness of those who dabble their fingers self-approvingly in the stuff of others’ souls.

About shows of honesty:
pure honesty is a doubtful quality; it means often lack of imagination. It means self assertiveness, being rather better than other people.

About the dishonesty of writers who hold back to avoid being criticized:
All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle of invisible censors. Hence their selfconsciousness, their restlessness. It wd. be worth while trying to discover what they [the censors] are at the moment. Did Wordsworth have them? I doubt it.

About her own uncensorable courage:
Lord, what a shivering coward I am – but not as a writer.

And, ecstatically, about her visionary powers:a consciousness of what I call “reality”: a thing I see before me; something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest & continue to exist. Reality I call it. And I fancy sometimes this is the most necessary thing to me.

Like her novels, her diary presents a truthful portrait of the way human beings think—human beings with all their complexity and contradictions, their contrasting inner and outer lives. She casually gives vent to the anti-Semitic prejudices of her class, even when writing about her husband, but is appalled by the Nazi persecution of the Jews, as she is appalled by all forms of injustice that she encounters, including within herself. Like every self-aware person—and unlike the virtue-proclaiming poseurs who, then as now, seem to populate the literary, artistic, and academic worlds—she has attitudes that she knows are wrong, that operate in her mind, not in her actions. As her revered Montaigne wrote, “We are, I know not how, double within ourselves, so that we disbelieve what believe, and cannot rid ourselves of that which we condemn.”

The diary can be read today because it was transcribed by a typist for Leonard Woolf, who used excerpts from that typescript when preparing A Writer's Diary, the one-volume selection that he published in 1953, and then gracefully and magnificently edited by Anne Olivier Bell, who was married to Virginia Woolf’s nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell. Published in five volumes from 1977 to 1984, the original edition remains nominally available in the United States in unappealing print-on-demand paperbacks from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich that you are unlikely to find in a bookshop. In Britain, the original Hogarth Press hardback editions went out of print decades ago, as did the slightly revised photo-offset reissues published in Britain by Penguin, leaving the diary unavailable in Britain for many years.

Then, in 2023, Granta, originally a magazine, now also a book publisher, announced a new edition, also in five volumes, with prefaces by contemporary authors, and with material that had been omitted from the original volumes. This includes the brief entries from a separate diary that Virginia Woolf had kept in 1917-18, previously published only in a magazine in 1994, and passages from the main diary that had been excluded because, as Virginia Nicholson writes in her foreword in Volume 1, they “might have caused distress or offence” to people who have since died and no longer need to be protected.

Granta’s publicity portrays the new edition as something triumphant: “published unexpurgated for the first time.” In reality, the new edition is a major disappointment, something between a missed opportunity and an editorial fiasco. The physical books are heavy and ugly, with amateurish typographic design, glued bindings, thick plastic-covered cardboard covers and rigid spines, all unpleasant to the touch and to the eye. The editorial work is slapdash, so much so that some of the passages that the publishers claim to have restored are not restored at all. Having added the 1917-18 entries from a separate diary, the new edition nowhere acknowledges that a whole book of earlier journals was published in 1990: A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909, edited by Mitchell Leaska. And though the forewords pay tribute to Anne Olivier Bell’s editorial work, the edition fails to include or even mention her witty and eloquent essay, “Editing Virginia Woolf’s Diary,” published in limited-edition pamphlets in 1989 and 1990, and since reprinted only in an obscure 2002 collection of academic essays on Virginia Woolf.

Granta, like many other publishers, imagines that the best way to market a book by a dead great writer is to append a personal foreword by a living minor one, which is the reality behind Granta’s claim that the new volumes are “introduced by a stellar line-up of contemporary writers.” Virginia Nicholson’s foreword to volume 1 is dutiful but perfunctory, and partly summarizes—without naming it—Anne Olivier Bell’s essay on editing the diary. The other forewords are irrelevant or impertinent; Adam Phillips’ foreword to Volume 2 describes Virginia Woolf as “sceptical about Freud and psychoanalysis,” but seems unaware that she later wrote that she “was gulping up Freud” and that she supposed she “did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients” in considering her long-felt emotions toward her parents in To the Lighthouse. Granta names the foreword-writers on the cover of each volume, but, unlike the original editions, doesn’t do the same for Anne Olivier Bell.

Matthew Macer-Wright and Stephen Barkway, writing in the Virginia Woolf Bulletin in September 2023, catalogue many faults that I haven’t already mentioned here, like reduced indexes that elide the rich explanatory detail in the original editions. The copyright pages claim that the new edition amends the biographical information in Anne Olivier Bell’s notes—and death-dates and some corrected birthdates are provided—but many names and references that were all but untraceable in the pre-internet era are left as “unidentified” although now anyone with a smartphone can locate them in seconds. For example, lines of verse in the entry for 1 August 1934 are by John Todhunter; “John Andrews” in the entry for 21 February 1937 was a dancer friend of Christopher Isherwood; “Mrs Moggridge” in the entry for 15 November 1938 was the aviator and author Jackie Moggridge. A footnote saying that Virginia Woolf’s short story “Gypsy, the Mongrel” “appears not to have been published” has not been updated to report its publication in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf in 1985.

But the strangest of all the gaps in the new edition are the omitted names that the publishers proudly announced they had restored. Five of these concealed names—some of them friends, some the subject of gossip—remain hidden behind a bracketed “[name omitted],” though a brief visit to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, which owns the original diaries and makes them accessible on a microfilm copy, is all that is needed to uncover them.

In the entry for 18 February 1928, for instance, observing about Dorothy Todd, Virginia Woolf wrote: “She likes life.” In the original she continues (restored passages in italics) “Going to bed with Garland & flirting with Osbert I presume.” Garland was Madge Garland, Fashion Editor of Vogue. In the entry for 19 July 1934, about a visit from Julian Bell, she wrote: “He dined & brought a skatelike looking woman - Hamerton - a mouth cut in a wide fishlike face …” This edition’s still-omitted “Hamerton” refers to Phyllis Hamerton, who had connections to Cambridge and Bloomsbury, was married to Sir Henry Lintott, and was the dedicatee of a novel by E. B. C. Jones (married to the Bloomsbury outlier F. L. Lucas), Morning and Cloud (1932). In the entry for 21 July 1934, about a visit to Victor and Barbara Rothschild, Virginia Woolf wrote: “he wanted to tell me what Dadie had told her about George Barnes & the servant & the boy all in the same bed as Ann: no thats not quite it ...” The elided George Barnes was the younger brother of Lytton Strachey’s cousin Mary Hutchinson; he was married to Anne (not Ann). And in the entry for 30 March 1939, reporting a visit from her friend the novelist Hugh Walpole, she wrote that Walpole “saw Ld. Carisbrooke naked: saw Ld Beauchamp in the act with a boy.” (I owe thanks to Stephen Barkway, who corrected my misreadings of some of these names.)

With these restored words, the Diary of Virginia Woolf is almost as complete as Granta claimed it was in 2023. But Granta failed to give its edition the updating and additions that it deserves and which a minimum of editorial attention could have provided. It still lacks the whole book of early diaries collected in A Passionate Apprentice, and still neglects Anne Olivier Bell’s essay on editing the diaries in favor of superfluous new forewords. As for the “stellar line-up of contemporary writers,” Granta might instead have paid attention to Virginia Woolf’s view on these matters: “Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.”

Textual and historical scholarship may seem like a dusty matter, but this diary, like everything written by Virginia Woolf, deserves the care and attention that Anne Olivier Bell gave it. Granta having published this less-than-adequate reissue forestalls a much-needed edition that is, in her words, “not slovenly,” but “steady, tranquil, composed with the aloofness of a work of art.”

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Edward Mendelson’s book The Inner Life of “Mrs. Dalloway” published by Columbia University Press, and his edition of Mrs. Dalloway, published by New York Review Books, will both appear in September.

Book Post writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan author of many novels, short stories, essays, a memoir, and several plays, died last week at the age of eighty-seven. Two years ago we published “The Politics of Translation,” a consideration of what literatures preserve in their original languages. His book on similar themes, Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas, was published by New Press just last month. His novels include The Devil on the Cross, The River Between, Petals of Blood, and Weep Not Child.

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Image: The original Hogarth Press editions of Virginia Woolf’s diary, edited by Anne Olivier Bell