24 March 1930 – 30 March 1930

Yes, but this book is a very queer business. I had a day of intoxication when I said “Children are nothing to this”: when I sat surveying the whole book complete and quarrelled with L. (about Ethel Smyth) and walked it off, felt the pressure of the form—the splendour, the greatness—as perhaps I have never felt them. But I shan’t race it off in intoxication. I keep pegging away; and find it the most complex and difficult of all my books. How to end, save by a tremendous discussion, in which every life shall have its voice—a mosaic—I do not know. The difficulty is that it is all at high pressure. I have not yet mastered the speaking voice. Yet I think something is there; and I propose to go on pegging it down, arduously, and then re-write, reading much of it aloud, like poetry. It will bear expansion. It is compressed I think. It is—whatever I make of it—a large and potential theme—which Orlando was not perhaps. At any rate, I have taken my fence.