Number of words: 592

Among the most interesting observations in the thirty volume between 1915 and 1941 are those Woolf made about diary-keeping itself. She is, in her diaries, one of the great critics of the genre. The activity is, after all, so queer, so ad hoc, and supposedly so private, that it doesn’t seem amiss for the diarist to stop every so often and ask himself just what he thinks he’s doing. Virginia Woolf does that as often as any diarist can read.

Many of her reflections on diaries are prompted by her neglect of them. The journals are frequently interrupted by physical illness, madness, the press of work or social life (“This diary may die of London, if I’m not careful”), and sheer disinclination. They can stop in the middle of a thought leaving her to ask, the next time she writes: “What is the use of finishing a sentence left unfinished a month ago?” She playfully scolds herself for the constant lapses, or makes excuses – she’s lost her writing board – but she’s not really worried; she knows the book always manages to get back up on its feet:  “Another of these skips, but I think the book draws its breathe steadily, if with deliberation.” The diary lives in guilty coexistence with her other writings. One Sunday morning in June 1925 she makes the “disgraceful confession” that she’s writing the diary instead of a novel or criticism; but this is only two months after she’d determined to “disregard other duties” in favor of the deprived diary.

Before her relative financial  success in the 1920s, she could lack the money to buy a new blank volume for it – something she has to mention in the temporary notebook that gets pressed into service. (It is no good writing on loose leaves. Only “in a bound volume, the year has a chance of life. It can be stood on a shelf.”) She is aware of all the difficulties and October 2, 1918, she writes, in her usual fast and conversational way:

No, I can’t write to Margaret Davies. I spent on her the first flush of ideas after tea – it is fated not to write the thing one wants to write at the moment of wanting to write it. Never thwart a natural process. I had so much to say here too. First, how the weather has changed……

She likes to write after tea, being herself  “so inveterate an habitual” as to to know the diary stands a better chance of fattening if it has a prescribed mealtime. It never loses speed and casualness, but she knows that one can learn technique for even this sort of “unpremeditated scribbling.” Woolf enjoys rereading her own diaries, and thinks that’s a better reason for continuing them than merely the increasing obligation one feels to keep on with she savors the physical and psychological pleasures of changing a pen nib, likes the idea of her diary as a “downy pillow” she can lie on when neglected by Vita, and feels it is a happily lawless enterprise compared to the deliberate shapes she gives her novels. Waiting for her tea on September 21, 1920, she thinks about how many things she has to tell the diary; yet her first sentence that afternoon, about her niece Angelica’s going to school for the first time, sets her “rambling off like an old woman into the past,” thinking of the end of her own childhood summer holidays.    

Excerpted from page number 31-33 of ‘Book of Ones Own People and Their Diaries’ by Thomas Mallon