The deep old desk: The diary of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf's diaries have traditionally been used by scholars to augment discussion of her “real” and “major” works—the fiction and non-fiction whose publication she supervised in her lifetime—with details of their genesis, composition, and production. But as Quentin Bell, Woolf's nephew and biographer, suggests, the diary itself is a major work, able to stand alongside her fictional masterpieces To the Lighthouse and The Waves (D1 xiii). The diary has been available nearly in its entirety for over fifteen years, and yet it is almost never considered as a text on its own. Of all of Woolf's work, the diary is at once her most traditional (in its reliance on the “plot” of her own life and its day-to-day form) and her most modern and experimental (in the ways in which she often shatters the traditional diary form, uses it to her own ends, and distances it from the published, grand, monolithic male diaries of the past). The six published volumes suggest broad questions about audience, authorial intention, issues of the body and embodiment, and the development of Woolf's modernism, while allowing for an extended look at her development as a writer, reader, wife, sister, and thinker.

This project provides a comprehensive reading of the diary, and examines certain issues and themes through a series of individual “lenses” which correspond to biographical and thematic elements. Woolf once likened her diary to a “deep old desk,” and this metaphor of the desk—that solid fixture with many drawers, cubbyholes, nooks and crannies—informs my work. Much as the desk is made of compartments, my project will look at discrete themes and topics from Woolf's diary in separate chapters, while addressing in each several overarching concerns that inform the diary as a whole.