Some artists peak early, producing their best work in their late teens or twenties. Woolf was the opposite, a later-life bloomer. She'd spent her early years contributing book reviews and other nerdish pieces to the Times Literary Supplement, but she didn't launch her Serious Author Career until she was 33. All of Woolf's greatest hits -- heart-wrenching masterpieces like Mrs. Dalloway, feminist classics like A Room of One's Own, experiments in lyricism like The Waves -- were written after she'd turned 40. In total, Woolf would publish ten novels, eleven book-length essay compilations, three collections of short fiction, and a biography. Her career even included a loopy, Magical Mystery Tour-esque phase: between 1927 and 1933, she wrote Flush, a fictionalized biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, and Orlando, a novel in which the protagonist abruptly switches sexes halfway through the book.
As it happens, when Woolf dedicated herself to Being a Serious Author in 1915, she also started keeping a diary. By the time she wrote her last entry, four days before her death, Woolf had amassed thirty volumes of completed journals. That's an average of 1.15 moleskines per year.
It was up to Woolf's husband, Leonard, to figure out what to do with her diaries after she was gone. About a decade after her death, in 1953, he decided to publish excerpts, which he compiled into a hefty but still severely edited volume titled A Writer's Diary.
A Writer's Diary is a book with a mission: Leonard wanted to nudge the world into better appreciating the talents of his late wife, whose works were at risk of being mostly forgotten. In his editor's preface, Leonard complains that Woolf's "position as an artist and the merits of her books are a subject of dispute." (This was true. Not to get all feministy here in the middle of a paragraph, but as of 1950 the English literary canon was wall-to-wall white dudes. Writers from other demographics might be lauded at the time of publication but then, mysteriously, their works tended not to make it into anthologies or onto lists of Great Books.) Woolf's diary chronicles her entire literary career, and Leonard apparently believed that he could help maneuver her into the canon (or at least get people to better appreciate her novels) by providing extensive evidence of Woolf's brilliant literary mind at work.
You get the feeling that Leonard didn't really want to publish the diary at all, but felt like he had to in order to show off her writerly genius. Just look at how insistent he is about keeping the scope of A Writer's Diary as narrow as possible (emphasis mine):
I have been carefully through [the diaries] and have extracted and now publish in this volume practically everything which referred to her own writing. ...The book throws light upon Virginia Woolf's intentions, objects, and methods as a writer. ...The diaries at least show the extraordinary energy, persistence, and concentration to which she devoted herself to the art of writing and the undeviating conscientiousness with which she wrote and rewrote and again rewrote her books.Leonard was ruthless about editing out anything that wasn't relevant to Woolf's artistic process. Frankly, there's a good reason for this: Leonard has no interest in airing dirty laundry, and he also firmly believes that even unabridged diaries are misleading. Readers think they're getting the full, uncensored view of what a person is really like, but actually:
At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer, because, as Virginia Woolf herself remarks somewhere in these diaries, one gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood -- irritation or misery, say -- and of not writing one's diary when one is feeling the opposite. The portrait is therefore from the start unbalanced.In other words, Leonard wants to protect his wife from being misunderstood. It's not that he's allergic to disclosure, but rather that he doesn't want to give the public a glimpse of Woolf's innermost mind and have us walk away thinking we've gotten a panorama.
Leonard died in 1969. About a decade later, Anne Olivier Bell (the wife of Woolf's nephew, Quentin Bell, who wrote a biography of his aunt) took on the project of publishing Woolf's diaries again, this time releasing them complete and unabridged. It took five volumes, which hit the shelves between 1977 and 1984, to cover the whole caboodle. Each volume in the set -- printed in tightly-knit font with bindings in muted greens and burgundies -- features the same black-and-white portrait of Woolf, middle-aged, looking pleasantly serene.
In her own editor's preface, Bell doesn't respond to Leonard's concerns about misrepresentation or try to justify the publication of Woolf's diary on ethical grounds. Instead, she simply describes the acquisition and copyright history of the diaries, explaining why she has the legal authority to tackle this project (e.g., "Negotiations were entered into with Dr John D. Gordan, Curator of the Berg Collection, and on his undertaking to purchase the diaries for $20,000..."). Her attitude is phlegmatic: Woolf is an important author, and her diaries are therefore a matter of public interest. Publishing them is a no-brainer.
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It's hard not to feel like Bell did something a bit icky.
For one, it seems pretty likely that Woolf would've hated having her full diary published. Privacy is one of the most prominent and persistent themes in her fiction: violating the dignity of an individual's right to solitude is basically the worst crime you can commit in a Woolf novel. Woolf frames privacy as something beautiful and sacred, the universe's spiritual consolation for the fact that we're all existentially isolated. We might never be able to truly understand one another, Clarissa reflects in Mrs. Dalloway, but at least we all have the "privacy of the soul," the comfort of keeping our own counsel.
Plus, when you read her diary, you learn that Woolf fell into a deep depression after each of her novels was published, in no small part because she had intense anxiety about allowing the general public to read her writing. As Leonard mentions in his preface, Woolf "wrote and rewrote and again rewrote her books," refusing to let anything go to print until she felt her words conveyed her meaning properly, and even then she was wracked with doubts. Again, Woolf doesn't seem to fear vulnerability so much as she detests the threat of being misrepresented, of revealing her soul and having it reflected back to her as a funhouse-mirror distortion. Imagine the horror of having a temperament like hers, and then having 21st century graduate students pore over your slapdash diary entries, treating every half-baked thought with the weight of gospel.
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Then again: Woolf's dead. Leonard's dead. What do we owe them?
No one actually argues that Bell did anything wrong or morally suspect. Publishing authors' diaries and letters and holograph drafts of works is not just common, it's expected for any writer worth paying attention to. Having her guts poured out in academic presses means that Woolf has, just as Leonard hoped, joined the elite ranks of Great Authors Whose Lives We Want to Endlessly Dissect.
What's interesting about this whole situation, to me, is that between Leonard's A Writer's Diary and Bell's The Diary of Virginia Woolf, we see Woolf making the transition from "person" to "figure." To Leonard, Woolf was a human being whose preferences and feelings should be considered. To Bell (and to everyone after her), Woolf was a historical subject to be researched.
It's rude to go digging through the personal effects of a person. Digging through the personal effects of a figure, though? That's just good scholarship.
