Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries and the Diaries She Read

“Lounsberry is the only scholar to treat Woolf ’s diaries for themselves—as works of art, as expressions of her private self, and as testing grounds for her experiments in novel writing.”—Panthea Reid, author of Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf
 
“Offers a fascinating alternative form of biography. Lounsberry is particularly skillful in combining close attention to and interpretation of the details of Woolf ’s diary with a fluent sense of her life being lived across the years.”—Mark Hussey, author of Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers, and Common Readers to Her Life, Work, and Critical Reception
 
In this second volume of her acclaimed study of Virginia Woolf ’s diaries, Barbara Lounsberry traces the English writer’s life through the thirteen diaries she kept from 1918 to 1929—what is often considered Woolf’s modernist “golden age.” During these interwar years, Woolf penned many of her most famous works, including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and A Room of One’s Own. Lounsberry shows how Woolf’s writing at this time was influenced by other diarists—Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Jonathan Swift, and Stendhal among them—and how she continued to use her diaries as a way to experiment with form and as a practice ground for her evolving modernist style.
 
Through close readings of Woolf ’s journaling style and an examination of the diaries she read, Lounsberry tracks Woolf ’s development as a writer and unearths new connections between her professional writing, personal writing, and the diaries she was reading at the time. Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path offers a new approach to Woolf ’s biography: her life as she marked it in her diary from ages 36 to 46.