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Posts Tagged ‘Virginia Woolf diaries’

To read words from Woolf on this auspicious day, check out this post that includes a popular quote from Woolf cited on this date three years ago, along with her diary entries for this date from 1918-1941.

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Becoming Virginia Woolf Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read, by Barbara Lounsberry, will be out next fall.

The book, which covers Woolf’s second, spare Modernist diary stage, from mid-1918 to mid-1929, can be purchased at a discount through Dec. 11. Download the flyer for details.

Published by the University Press of Florida, Lounsberry’s book is described as the only full-length work to explore the topic of Woolf’s diaries. In it, she illuminates how Woolf’s private and public writing was shaped by the diaries of other writers, including Samuel Pepys, James Boswell and more.

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Personal details of Virginia Woolf’s final years are available to the public for the first time after the University of Sussex acquired this engagement diary and seven more at a Sotheby’s auction.

Personal details of Virginia Woolf’s final years are available to the public for the first time after the University of Sussex acquired this engagement diary and seven more at a Sotheby’s auction.

The University of Sussex has purchased Virginia Woolf’s small pocket engagement diaries that she used to detail her personal life from 1930 to 1941. The last entry is for March 28, 1941, which is written in pencil by  Leonard Woolf, and simply states “Died.”

The University of Sussex has purchased Virginia Woolf’s small pocket engagement diaries that she used to detail her personal life from 1930 to 1941. The last entry is for March 28, 1941, which is written in pencil by  Leonard Woolf, and simply states “Died.”

The diaries briefly record Woolf’s meetings with contemporaries, including E. M. Forster and T. S. Eliot, along with visits to her artist sister Vanessa Bell. They also indicate when she would be staying at her home Monk’s House in Rodmell, East Sussex.

Some of the diaries include pencil lines through several dates and appointments, accompanied by the word “Bed,”indicating periods when she was experiencing health problems.

The University’s Special Collections has an extensive collection of materials related to Woolf. It bought the diaries to complement the Monks House Papers, which were donated to the University’s Special Collections in 1972 and contain Woolf’s correspondence from other writers, family, friends, admirers and publishers. They also include her reading notebooks, drafts of essays and typescripts of some of her works, proofed and corrected in her own hand.

The Monks House Papers fall into three groups: letters, manuscripts and press-cuttings. There is documentation of Woolf’s career from her earliest journalism to what was possibly her final short fiction, ‘The Watering Place’, a two-page manuscript which draws on a diary entry of 1941 written shortly before her suicide.

Fiona Courage, special collections manager, said: “The collection very much represents Woolf’s ‘everyday’ life in the same way that the pocket engagement diaries do. As with the engagement diaries, our collections relate to Woolf as an individual rather than her public persona of novelist, reviewer and essayist.

“The activities recorded in these engagement diaries  may not have found their way into her more detailed daily diaries, but  are significant in terms of her daily life, her social circle and her physical and mental state. The diaries also complement a set of appointment diaries belonging to Leonard Woolf, and held within his papers at the University.”

She added that these diaries have never been made publically available for research.“By acquiring them we can now make them accessible to scholars, enthusiasts and the general public.”

The University was able to raise the £60,000 necessary to buy the diaries with support from the V&A/MLA Purchase Grant Fund*, the Friends of the National Libraries and a number of individual donors.

Besides the Monk’s House Papers and the small engagement diaries, the University of Sussex Special Collections holds the following related materials:

  • Leonard Woolf Papers
  • Charleston Papers
  • Birrell Papers
  • Nicolson Papers
  • A.O. Bell Papers
  • Quentin Bell Papers
  • Emery Collection
  • Maria Jackson Letters
  • Mrs Woolf and the Servants: research papers

Additional biographical and literary manuscripts of Virginia Woolf that were at Monk’s House are now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library in New York. The Berg Collection holds the largest collection of Woolf manuscripts in the world.

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VW Diary Vol. 5Today we have a link to a blog post sent in by a Blogging Woolf reader. It discusses Virginia Woolf’s lifelong habit of keeping a diary and how that practice has morphed into blogging for many today.

Is this a sad development or just a reality we must accept? And does the medium affect the message? Read “The Diary of Virginia Woolf and the Blogosphere” by at Blue Duets.

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