Book, Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Os: Diary 1 (1915-1918)[LS]

This is the first volume of a diary that Virginia Woolf kept, with some hiatuses, for 44 years, from her adolescence until a few days after her death. Experienced as an endless writing, Virginia Woolf's diary represents her longing for a system capable of including everything, without distinctions – the low and the sublime, the public and the private. In the first volume, the 33-year-old, recently married and not yet published, resumes writing a diary project that she had interrupted in her late teens. Gaps are one of the main features of this beginning. The desire to use the diary as a ground to consolidate herself as a writer is now hampered by two mental breakdowns that she suffered, first in 1913 – and from which she had barely recovered in 1915, when the volume begins – and then a month and a half later. after starting it. Virginia is still finding, with great difficulty, her literary voice and a form for her diary. Until 1919 he would take on the face he would have in later years, sometimes encompassing in the same paragraph domestic comments, literary analyzes and events of the time, trivialities and excerpts of extreme beauty – the aridity of everyday life side by side with the questioning of the spirit. A great reader of the genre that she is and with a very clear project for her diary, Virginia moves it away from the stereotype of a confessional text and transforms it into a testing ground for her experiments, using it above all to always observe: the world, the others and, in particular, herself. Thus, what we see throughout its hundreds of pages is not the consolidated portrait of a “single” Virginia Woolf, but the record of constant change. When this volume opens, Virginia and Leonard, who had married in 1912, are living in Richmond, a city near London. The diary at the beginning is often read by Leonard, at the request of Virginia herself. She is about to publish her first novel, The Voyage Out – and the fact that she only mentions it once does not mean that it was not a source of anguish: often in her diary she deals obliquely with the most impactful events of her life. It is assumed that the expectation of this publication was one of the triggers for his second collapse.