Becoming Virginia Woolf : her early diaries and the diaries she read /
Barbara Lounsberry.
- Gainesville : University Press of Florida, (c)2014.
- 1 online resource (x, 257 pages)
Includes bibliographies and index.
Introduction -- 1. Early Diary Influences: Virginia Woolf's 1897 diary; Sir Walter Scott's "gurnal"; Fanny Burney's diary; Samuel Pepys's diary; William Johnson Cory's Journals; Virginia Woolf's 1897 diary concluded -- 2. The Experimenter: Virginia Woolf's 1899 warboys diary -- 3. Choosing the Outsider Role: Virginia Woolf's 1903 diary; James Boswell's Journal of a tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. -- 4. Professional Writer: Virginia Woolf's 1904-1905 diary -- 5. Embracing the Unconscious: Virginia's Woolf's ghostly 1905 Cornwall diary; Virginia Woolf's 1906-1908 Great Britain travel diary; William Allingham's Diary; Lady Dorothy Nevill's Note-books; Lady Charlotte Bury's Diary of a lady-in-waiting; Virginia Woolf's Great Britain travel diary concluded -- 6. The Problem of Description: Virginia Woolf's 1906-1909 continental travel diary; The Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland; Virginia Woolf's continental travel diary concluded; Virginia Woolf's 1909 life diary; Dr. Charles Meryon's diaries celebrating Lady Hester Stanhope; Ralph Waldo Emerson's early Journals; Mary Coleridge's diary -- 7. The Diary Coalesces: Virginia Woolf's 1915 diary; Mary Berry's Journals; Virginia Woolf's Asheham House natural history diary: 1917-1918; Virginia Woolf's 1917-1918 collaborative Hogarth House diary; The Journals of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt; Stopford Brooke's diary; Virginia Woolf's 1918 coalescing Hogarth House diary: January 4-July 23 -- Epilogue.
Encompassing thirty-eight handwritten volumes, Virginia Woolf's diary is her longest work, her longest sustained, and last work to reach the public. In the only full-length work to explore deeply this luminous and boundary-stretching masterpiece, Barbara Lounsberry traces Woolf's development as a writer through her first twelve diaries-a fascinating experimental stage, where the earliest hints of Woolf's pioneering modernist style can be seen. Starting with fourteen-year-old Woolf's first palm-sized leather diary, Becoming Virginia Woolf illuminates how her private and public writing.