A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf Read Free Book Online

of it. It's having no children, living away from friends, failing to write well, spending too much on food, growing old. I think too much of whys and wherefores; too much of myself. I don't like time to flap round me. Well then, work. Yes, but I so soon tire of work—can't read more than a little, an hour's writing is enough for me. Out here no one comes in to waste time pleasantly. If they do, I'm cross. The labour of going to London is too great. Nessa's children grow up, and I can't have them in to tea, or go to the Zoo. Pocket money doesn't allow of much. Yet I'm persuaded that these are trivial things; it's life itself, I think sometimes, for us in our generation so tragic—no newspaper placard without its shriek of agony from someone. McSwiney this afternoon and violence in Ireland; or it'll be the strike. Unhappiness is everywhere; just beyond the door; or stupidity, which is worse. Still I don't pluck the nettle out of me. To write
Jacob's Room
again will revive my fibres, I feel. Evelyn is due; but I don't like what I write now. And with it all how happy I am—if it weren't for my feeling that it's a strip of pavement over an abyss.

1921
    Tuesday, March 1st
    I am not satisfied that this book is in a healthy way. Suppose one of my myriad changes of style is antipathetic to the material? or does my style remain fixed? To my mind it changes always. But no one notices. Nor can I give it a name myself. The truth is that I have an internal, automatic scale of values; which decides what I had better do with my time. It dictates "this half hour must be spent on Russian." "This must be given to Wordsworth." Or "Now I'd better dam my brown stockings." How I come by this code of values I don't know. Perhaps it's the legacy of puritan grandfathers. I suspect pleasure slightly. God knows. And the truth is also that writing, even here, needs screwing of the brain—not so much as Russian, but then half the time I learn Russian I look in the fire and think what I shall write tomorrow. Mrs. Flanders is in the orchard. If I were at Rodmell I should have thought it all out walking on the flats. I should be in fine writing trim. As it is Ralph, * Carrington † and Brett ‡ have this moment gone; I'm dissipated; we dine and go out to the Guild. I can't settle as I should to think of Mrs. Flanders in the orchard.

    Sunday, March 6th
    Nessa approves of
Monday or Tuesday—
mercifully; and thus somewhat redeems it in my eyes. But I now wonder a little what the reviewers will make of it—this time next month. Let me try to prophesy. Well,
The Times
will be kindly, a little cautious. Mrs. Woolf, they will say, must beware of virtuosity. She must beware of obscurity. Her great natural gifts etc.... She is at her best in the simple lyric, or in
Kew Gardens. An
Unwritten Novel
is hardly a success. And as for
A Society,
though spirited, it is too one-sided. Still Mrs. Woolf can always be read with pleasure. Then, in the
Westminster, Pall Mall
and other serious evening papers I shall be treated very shortly with sarcasm. The general line will be that I am becoming too much in love with the sound of my own voice; not much in what I write; indecently affected; a disagreeable woman. The truth is, I expect, that I shan't get very much attention anywhere. Yet, I become rather well known.

    Friday, April 8th. 10 minutes to 11 a.m.
    And I ought to be writing
Jacob's Room;
and I can't, and instead I shall write down the reason why I can't—this diary being a kindly blankfaced old confidante. Well, you see, I'm a failure as a writer. I'm out of fashion: old: shan't do any better: have no headpiece: the spring is everywhere: my book out (prematurely) and nipped, a damp firework. Now the solid grain of fact is that Ralph sent my book out to
The Times
for review without date of publication in it. Thus a short notice is scrambled through to be in "on Monday at latest," put in an obscure place, rather scrappy, complimentary