Virginia Woolf’s diary, 1935

The play rather tosh;* but I’m not going to bother about making a good impression as a playwright. And I had a lovely old year’s walk yesterday round the rat farm…

The play came off last night, with the result that I am drybrained this morning and can only use this book as a pillow. It was said, inevitably, to be a great…

Yes, I ought to have explained why I wrote the Sickert. I always think of things too late. I am reading The Faery Queen—with delight. I shall write about it. I took…

And again this morning, Friday, I’m too tired to go on with Ps. Why? Talking too much I daresay. I thought, though, I wanted “society”: and saw Helen, Mary,…

Sara is the real difficulty: I can’t get her into the main stream, yet she is essential. A very difficult problem; this transition business. And the burden of…

A very fine skyblue day, my windows completely filled with blue for a wonder. Mr. Riley has just mended them. And I have been writing and writing and rewriting the…

And I’ve just written it all over again. But it must do this time, I say to myself. Yet I know that I must put the screw on and write some pages again. It’s too…

I have had three severe swingeings lately: Wyndham Lewis; Mirsky; and now Swinnerton. Bloomsbury is ridiculed; and I am dismissed with it. I didn’t read W. L.: and…

The only thing worth doing in this book is to stick it out: stick to the idea and don’t lower it an inch, in deference to anyone. What’s so odd is the way the whole…

Too jaded again to tackle that very difficult much too crowded raid chapter. In fact I am on the verge of the usual headache—for one thing yesterday was such a…

And this morning, in spite of being in a rage, I wrote the whole of that d——d chapter again, in a spasm of desperation and, I think, got it right, by breaking up,…

I see I am becoming a regular diariser. The reason is that I cannot make the transition from Pargiters to Dante without some bridge. And this cools my mind. I am…

At this rate I shall never finish the Purgatorio. But what’s the use of reading with half one’s mind running on Eleanor and Kitty. Oh that scene wants compacting.…

I met Morgan in the London Library yesterday and flew into a passion. “Virginia, my dear,” he said. I was pleased by that little affectionate familiar tag. “Being a…

Let me make a note that it would be much wiser not to attempt to sketch a draft of On Being Despised, or whatever it is to be called, until The Ps. is done with. I…

All desire to practise the art of a writer has completely left me. I cannot imagine what it would be like: that is, more accurately, I cannot curve my mind to the…

Odd to see the countries change into each other. Beds now made of layers on top. No sheets. Houses building. Austrian, dignified. Winter lasts at Innsbruck till…

Oddities of the human brain: woke early and again considered dashing off my book on Professions, to which I had not given a single thought these 7 or 8 days. Why?…

I’m writing at six on a Sunday evening, with a band playing and stopping and children shouting in a too luxurious hotel where the waiters bring one the menu and I…

Back here* again, and the grim wooden feeling that has made me think myself dead since we came back is softening slightly. It’s beginning this cursed dry hand empty…

At Monks House. Working very hard. I think I shall rush these scenes off. Yet I cannot write this morning (Tuesday). How can I say, naturally, I have inherited the…

In some ways, it’s rather like writing The Waves—these last scenes. I bring my brain to a state of congestion, have to stop; go upstairs, run into towsled Mrs.…

A curious sense of complete failure. Margery hasn’t written to me about my speech:† according to Janie, Pamela thought the whole thing a failure. And it was for…

Just now I finished my first wild retyping and find the book comes to 740 pages: that is 148,000 words; but I think I can shorten: all the last part is still…

No. I go on getting preliminary headaches. It is no good trying to do the last spurt, which should be much like a breeze in the heavy elms, these last days here:…

I cannot make a single note here, because I am so terrifically pressed rewriting—yes, typing out again at the rate, if possible, of 100 pages a week, this…

I am going to wrap my brain in green dock leaves for a few days: 5, if I can hold out; till the children, L.’s nieces, have gone. If I can—for I think a scene is…

Mornings which are neither quiet nor heavenly, but mixed of hell and ecstasy: never have I had such a hot balloon in my head as re-writing The Years: because it’s…

What a combination for the superstitious! Driving off to visit Margaret and Lilian at Dorking: and I have got into a mild flood I think with The Years. The…

Yesterday we went to the L.P. meeting at Brighton and, of course, though I have refused to go again this morning, I am so thrown out of my stride that I can’t hitch…

What I have discovered in writing The Years is that you can only get comedy by using the surface layer—for example, the scene on the terrace. The question is can I…

I am again held up in The Years by my accursed love of talk. That is to say, if I talk to Rose Macaulay from 4–6:30: to Elizabeth Bowen from 8–12 I have a dull…

Too many specimen days—so I can’t write. Yet, heaven help me, have a feeling that I’ve reached the no man’s land that I’m after; and can pass from outer to inner…

It’s all very well to write that date in a nice clear hand, because it begins this new book, but I cannot disguise the fact that I’m almost extinct, like a…

And today, no it’s no go. I can’t write a word: too much headache. Can only look back at The Years as an inaccessible Rocky Island; which I can’t explore, can’t…