Virginia Woolf’s diary, 1927

This is out of order, but I have no new book and so must record here (and it was here I recorded the beginning of the Lighthouse) must record here the end. This…

Well Leonard has read To the Lighthouse and says it is much my best book and it is a “masterpiece.” He said this without my asking. I came back from Knole and sat…

X’s prose is too fluent. I’ve been reading it and it makes my pen run. When I’ve read a classic I am curbed and—not castrated; no, the opposite; I can’t think of…

Why not invent a new kind of play; as for instance: Woman thinks . . . He does. Organ plays. She writes. They say: She sings. Night speaks They miss I think it must…

But I intend to work harder and harder. If they—the re-spectables, my friends, advise me against the Lighthouse, I shall write memoirs; have a plan already to get…

Faith Henderson* came to tea; and, valiantly beating the waters of conversation, I sketched the possibilities which an unattractive woman, penniless, alone, might…

My brain is ferociously active. I want to have at my books as if I were conscious of the lapse of time; age and death. Dear me, how lovely some parts of the…

The book. Now on its feet so far as praise is concerned. It has been out 10 days: Thursday a week ago. Nessa enthusiastic—a sublime, almost upsetting spectacle. She…

Women haters depress me and both Tolstoi and Mrs. Asquith hate women. I suppose my depression is a form of vanity. But then so are all strong opinions on both…

This diary shall batten on the leanness of my social life. Never have I spent so quiet a London summer. It is perfectly easy to slip out of the crush unobserved. I…

Now I must sketch out the Eclipse. About 10 on Tuesday night several very long trains, accurately filled (ours with civil servants) left Kings Cross. In our…

This is a book, I think I have said before, which I write after tea. And my brain was full of ideas, but I have spent them on Mr. Ashcroft and Miss Findlater,…

I will now snatch a moment from what Morgan calls “life” to enter a hurried note. My notes have been few; life a cascade, a glissade, a torrent; all together. I…

A hurried note about the lunch party, L. dining at the Cranium. An art of light talk; about people. Bogey Harris; Maurice Baring. B. H. “knows” everyone: that is no…

This is almost the shortest day and perhaps the coldest night of the year. We are in the black heart of a terrific frost. I notice that look of black atoms in a…

I just open this for a moment, being dull of the head, to enter a severe reprimand of myself to myself. The value of society is that it snubs one. I am…