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The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf’s book of essays published in 1925 with a jacket design by her sister Vanessa Bell, was provisionally titled Reading.

In it, she planned to revise some of her previously published essays and add some new ones, according to Mark Hussey in Virginia Woolf A to Z. Among its most important essays are “On Not Knowing Greek,” “Modern Fiction,” and “How It Strikes a Contemporary.”

One hundred years ago today, in her Sept. 5, 1923, diary entry, Woolf fills the half hour before dinner with her thoughts about beginning to write her book of collected essays:

A cold douche should be taken (& generally is) before beginning a book. It invigorates; makes one say “Oh all right. I write to please myself,” & so go ahead. It also has the effect of making me more definite & outspoken in my style, which I imagine all to the good. At any rate, I began for the 5th but last time, I swear, what is now to be called The Common Reader; & did the first page quite moderately well this morning. After all this stew, its odd how, as soon as I begin, a new aspect, never all this 2 or 3 years thought of, at once becomes clear; & gives the whole bundle a new proportion. To curtail, I shall really investigate literature with a view to answering certain questions about ourselves–Characters are to be merely views: personality must be avoided at all costs. I’m sure my Conrad adventure taught me this. Directly you specify hair, age, &tc something frivolous, or irrelevant, gents the book –Dinner! – Diary 2, 265.

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In August of 1923 Virginia Woolf was in the middle of writing the novel that would eventually be published in 1925 under the title Mrs. Dalloway. After writing in her diary that she was “battling for ever so long” with the novel — tentatively titled The Hours — on the following day, she spelled out the stream of consciousness technique she planned to use in her groundbreaking work.

In this oft-quoted passage written on Aug. 30, 1923, she describes the process as digging out “beautiful caves” behind her characters. This is what she wrote:

You see, I’m thinking furiously about Reading & Writing. I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good deal about The Hours, & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment — Dinner! –Diary 2, 263.

Later in the year, on Oct. 15, she describes the process a bit differently:

It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by installments, as I have need of it. – A Writer’s Diary, 60.

 

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One hundred years ago today, on Saturday, 29 August 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary about the novel she was writing. Originally titled The Hours, it would be published in 1925 as Mrs. Dalloway.

I’ve been battling for ever so long with ‘The Hours’, which is proving one of my most tantalising & refractory of books. Parts are so bad, parts so good; I’m much interested; can’t stop making it up yet — yet. What is the matter with it? But I want to freshen myself, not deaden myself, so will say no more. Only I must note this odd symptom; a conviction that I shall go on, see it through, because it interests me to write it. — Diary 2, 262.

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This June, Granta Books will publish new ‘unepurgated’ editions of Virginia Woolf’s complete diaries, each introduced by a noted contemporary writer.

The five volumes of Woolf’s Diary edited by Anne Olivier Bell, along with A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909, edited by Mitchell E. Leaska

They are based on Anne Olivier Bell’s 1977–84 editions. But since Olivier Bell promises in her “Editor’s Preface” to The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II: 1920-1924 that “nothing has been omitted” from the edition she edited (ix),  I have to wonder what makes the Granta Books editions “unexpurgated.”

What are these new editions including that the previous editions did not? I guess we will have to wait until June to find out.

The volumes and their forewords

The volume divisions of the new editions remain the same. However, each volume will contain a foreword by a different writer.

  • Vol. 1: 1915–19: Virginia Nicholson
  • Vol. 2: 1920–4: Adam Phillips
  • Vol. 3: 1925–30: Olivia Laing
  • Vol. 4: 1931–5: Margo Jefferson
  • Vol. 5: 1936–41: Siri Hustvedt

Each of the five new hardbacks features a modern black and white photograph on the cover and will be priced at £30.

The back story of the diaries

Olivier Bell, wife of Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell, gave an account of her work editing Virginia’s diaries in the Bloomsbury Workshop publication, Editing Virginia Woolf’s Diary (1990).

In that volume and in the “Editor’s Preface” to The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I: 1915-1919, she shares the fact that before Quentin started researching his biography of Virginia, Leonard Woolf had Virginia’s 30 volumes of diaries and journals, which were written between 1915 and 1941, transcribed and typed up by Kathleen Williams (D1 viii).

However, because Leonard had used scissors to cut out the sections that he included in A Writer’s Diary (1954), Olivier Bell had to type up the missing sections and piece the transcripts back together (Editing, p. 10) for use in establishing a note card chronology for Quentin’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972).

After Leonard’s death and the settling of his estate, Virginia’s diaries were taken from the Westminster Bank in Lewes in 1970 and sent to the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, where they now remain.

More than four-fifths of her diary entries had not been included in A Writer’s Diary. Thus, “an unabridged publication of the complete series of diaries was decided upon” and Olivier Bell would edit them (Editing 16). She was a natural because, she argues, after helping Quentin with his biographical research and marrying into the family, she was already familiar with the material — all 2,317 pages worth — along with many of the characters, the country, the houses, and more.

The project became “too much to accomplish single-handed,” so she enlisted the help of Andrew McNeillie of Oxford to help her. Some of the editing work involved detection — ferreting out Woolf’s vague references to to such things as “this old manor house” at Hounslow or “Miss Arnold who used to lie drunk” (Editing 18-19).

Near the end of her account in Editing Virginia Woolf’s Diary, Olivier Bell writes:

After some twenty years working with her diaries I still find them wonderfully enjoyable — brilliant, funny, informative, moving, a record of her life and observations set down with unsurpassed felicity of language by a woman of extraordinary intelligence, courage, humour and imagination: in short, a genius (23).

More on the new editions

For further information on the new editions of Woolf’s diaries, see pages 26–7 of Granta’s online catalogue:

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Virginia Woolf didn’t get old—not what we call old—but she brooded about aging,VW Diary Vol. 5 increasingly so in middle age.

Shortly before her 50th birthday, she wrote in her diary:

Can we count on another 20 years? I shall be fifty on 25th and sometimes feel that I have lived 250 years already and sometimes that I am still the youngest person on the omnibus” – Diary 4, 1/13/32)

Her ambivalence was predicated on her writing. When it was going well, she was contented and high—“divinely happy & pressed with ideas” (D4, 1/16/34). If it wasn’t, she was “so old, so ugly, & can’t write” (D5, 3/11/39).

The clock ticks for us all

Woolf’s experience isn’t unique. After 40 or 50, we hear the clock ticking, feel age creeping up on us. We fend it off, stay active and engaged, but we can’t deny the inevitable. We get old, and as we do, our creativity and productivity become increasingly challenged. We face and fear disability, dementia, decline, death. We’re subjected to increasing ageism from without and self-doubt from within. How can we sustain a positive mindset?

In the recently published Dancing with the Muse in Old Age (Coffeetown Press, 2022), Priscilla Long proposes looking at creativity in old age “as a potentially dynamic and productive time full of connections to others and deeply satisfying work.”

Our advantage is experience, the skills we’ve learned and exercised over time, not just technical and craft skills but also the attitudes and ways of working that Long calls meta-skills.

In her own case, she says, “I have learned how to learn. I have learned how to focus, how to break a problem down into its component parts, how to encourage myself, how to take my time when venturing into new territory.”

Continuing to create

Dancing With the Muse reinforces extensive research and scientific findings with examples of women and men, most in the arts, who continued to be creative and productive well into old age. Long cites more than 100 artists and musicians, scientists and athletes, and writers, including Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou, Iris Murdoch, and Doris Grumbach (a Woolf enthusiast who died last year at 104). And Leonard Woolf!

Among those whose creative output in their later years included “looking back, remembering, and articulating one’s life and its meanings,” Leonard Woolf wrote his five-volume autobiography in his last decade. Had she lived to old age, I believe Virginia Woolf would have expanded her self-writing, extending the autobiographical work in Moments of Being.

This is Priscilla Long’s sixth book, including two volumes of poetry, an essay collection, and a writing manual. At 79, she has several works in progress, her goal to publish ten more books while making sure to clock her 10,000 steps every day. Virginia Woolf didn’t have a Fitbit, but her miles over the Downs and around London were conducive to her physical and mental health and stimulated her creativity.

Poised to shoot forth arrows

The painter Robert Motherwell said at age 71 that “to retire from painting would be to retire from life.” I’m certain that “old Virginia,” as she liked to refer to her future self in her early diaries, would have concurred and would have continued to write. At 50, she declared herself “poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun” (D4, 10/2/32).

When an acquaintance worried that his creative well would run dry, she observed that her concern was quite the opposite; she wondered if she would have enough time to write everything that was in her head.

Days before her death at 59, she reminded herself to “Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age and wrote round and about. Occupation is essential” (D5, 3/8/41).

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