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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