“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual,” Virginia Woolf wrote on 17 February 1922, when she had just turned 40. Her diary is full of pain: deaths, losses, illness, grief, depression, anguish, fear. But on every page life breaks in, with astonishing energy, relish and glee. The diary is an unmatchable record of her times, a gallery of vividly observed individuals, an intimate and courageousself-examination, a revelation of a writer’s creative processes, a tender, watchful nature journal, and a meditation on life, love, marriage, friendship, solitude, society, time and mortality. It’s one of the greatest diaries ever written, and it’s excellent to see it back in print.
Woolf’s first surviving diary entry was made in 1897, when she was nearly 15; her last was on 24 March 1941, four days before her death. She kept these 42 years’ worth of writings in unlined notebooks with soft covers which she bound in coloured papers. She often referred back to them to remind herself of her past, and she drew on them when she started her memoir, Sketch of the Past, in 1939. When her London house was bombed in October 1940, she made sure to salvage them.
