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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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It’s Valentine’s Day. And in Virginia Woolf’s Diary: Volume 2, there is no entry for Feb. 14, 1923, 100 years ago today. So instead I have pulled a quote from her Feb. 14, 1922, diary, 99 years ago.

In it, she does not mention Valentine’s Day, but she does share a bit of detail about her dinner at Hogarth House, their home in Richmond from 1915-1924.

We dine over the fire. L. has his tray on a little stool. We are as comfortable as cottagers (looked at through the window) . . . Diary: Volume 2, pg. 161.

The fireplace in the dining room at Monk’s House, the Woolf’s summer home in Sussex from 1919 until their deaths.

 

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In my little corner of Ohio, it is unseasonably warm today. And while I haven’t walked around my garden to see what spring blossoms might be coming up early, I did peruse Virginia Woolf’s diary entry made one hundred years ago today. In it, she does something like that.

On Feb. 10, 1923, while living in Richmond, Woolf wrote a long diary entry. On that day, she included her observations of the first signs of spring and the weather as she walked to the local cemetery, along with details of her recently developed daily schedule:

The spring the spring, I sing in imitation of Wagner, & saw a gorze bush set with soft yellow buds. Then we got into the Park, where the rain drove dogs & humans home, & so back on the stroke of three. It is now our plan (a day old) to walk from 2 to 3; print from 3 to 5; delay our tea; & so make headway. – Diary: Volume 2, pg. 233.

She also relates an earlier conversation with Mary* in which she discussed her mood that winter, which she thought had been affected by the genre of writing in which she had been involved:

But I suppose I talked most, & about myself. How I’d been depressed since Jan. 3rd. We ran it to earth, I think, by discovering that I began journalism on that day. Last Thursday, I think, I returned to fiction, to the instant nourishment & well being of my entire day. – Diary: Volume 2, pg. 234.

*Mary is not identified in this entry in Volume 2 of the diary, although she is likely Mary Hutchinson, as Alice Lowe mentions in the comments below.

Early spring blooms picked and arranged by my granddaughter when she was just 10.

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