After Virginia Woolf

Aug 1, 2025

Almost two weeks ago, six months after I started Volume One, I finished re-reading the fifth and final volume of Virginia Woolf’s diary. In the middle of reading Volume Four, I posted a short newsletter here about Virginia’s and her husband Leonard’s reactions to the growing threat of war in the mid-1930s. Now that I’ve finished reading the entire diary, I realize I have a little more to get out of my system before moving on.1 (Be forewarned that this post may take you a short way down a rabbit hole.)

I began Volume 5 with a sense of foreboding, because I knew Virginia recorded the last entry shortly before she died in 1941. It begins in 1936, when many people in Britain were coming to realize that war with Germany was more likely than not. Virginia and her husband Leonard — born into a secular Anglo-Jewish family — understood better than most how soon war was likely to begin, given their prominent position in Britain’s intelligentsia and Leonard’s leading role in the Labour Party. They also grasped its likely horrific consequences. The Woolfs had a house in London’s Tavistock Square and a house in Sussex, known as Monk’s House, situated about 4 miles from the Channel and a few miles from her sister’s farmhouse, Charleston. The Woolfs drove back and forth between their London and Sussex residences on a weekly basis, but when Britain declared war on Germany in response to its invasion of Poland, they began to spend more and more time in the relative safety of the countryside. However, when the bombing raids started in the fall of 1940, they were prey to random bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe coming from the south en route to London. Their home in Tavistock Square was destroyed by a bomb in the fall, although they had already removed much of their belongings from it. In their village of Rodmell, they regularly heard explosions close-by, received reports of deaths of neighbors, friends, and acquaintances, but, they continued to work and play bowls on the lawn in their garden in the evenings before blackout.

Throughout the first year of the war, Virginia’s tone in her diary is matter-of-fact, never panicked. She kept her focus on work — and on beating Leonard at bowls. She admits that work helped fend off depression, but otherwise she composed restrained accounts of the fear and disruption the bombings caused. She writes that she felt a sense of disorientation.

…everything becomes meaningless: cant plan: then there come too the community feeling: all England thinking the same thing — this horror of war — at the same moment. Never felt it so strong before. Then the lull & one lapses again into private separation —

But I must order macaroni from London.

Everyone was kept on tenterhooks, expecting any day that the Germans would invade England. Mortal danger was vivid and ominous to her.

A gritting day. As sample of my present mood, I reflect: capitulation will mean all Jews to be given up. Concentration camps. So to our garage.

Now we suffer what the Poles suffered. Fight in our fortress: are conquered: I have my morphia in pocket.

Lately, accounts in the media of ICE raids make it possible to imagine what it must have felt like to live with the threat of invasion and internment closing in. It is doubly horrible to contemplate, because we know what lay ahead for her, her family and friends, the British, the French, the Poles, and especially the Jews. The toll the war took on her emotions and mental health must have gradually become insupportable. Yet, as terrifying as the war became, she seems to have successfully balanced the annoyances of everyday life and the distress caused by the whining and rumble of bombers flying overhead.

The great advantage of this page is that it gives me a fidget ground. Fidgets: caused by losing at bowls & invasion; caused by another howling banshee, by having no book I must read; & so on.

The daytime bombing raids over England eased in October, 1940, while the nighttime raids on London intensified until spring of the following year, by which time Virginia was no more. The same even tone prevails in the diary throughout. Some of her entries in January and February, 1941, have the feel of reportage.

But something inside her must have changed in late fall 1940 and winter 1941, even though her slowly dissolving equanimity is not reflected in her diary.

In her last diary entry, she begins by describing her visit to a neighbor:

Monday 24 March

She had a nose like the Duke of Wellington & great horse teeth & cold prominent eyes. When we came in she was sitting perched on a 3 cornered chair with knitting in her hands. An arrow fastened her collar. And before 5 minutes had passed she had told us that two of her sons had been killed in the war. This, one felt, was to her credit. She taught dressmaking. Everything in the room was red brown & glossy. Sitting there I tried to coin a few compliments. But they perished in the icy sea between us. And then there was nothing.

A curious sea side feeling in the air today. It reminds me of lodgings on a parade at Easter. Everyone leaning against the wind, nipped & silenced. All pulp removed.

This windy corner. And Nessa [Vanessa] is at Brighton, & I am imagining how it wd be if we could infuse souls.

Octavia’s story. Could I englobe it somehow? English youth in 1900.

Two long letters from Shena & O. I cant tackle them, yet enjoy having them.

L. is doing the rhododendrons. (477-78)

That’s it. Four days later she ended her life at the age of 59. That is all she wrote in the diary she had kept since she was a girl. A word-portrait of a neighbor, an observation about the weather, a momentary metaphysical speculation, ideas of how to develop the latest narrative she was working on, the pleasure of receiving letters, and her awareness of Leonard’s proximity in the garden. All in a day’s work, nothing to see here.

On 28 March, 1941, in the late morning, she walked across the fields behind Monk’s House to banks of the River Ouse, where she filled her pockets with stones, and drowned herself.

When I finished reading her last entry, my feelings were irrational. I was outraged. Wait a minute! What about me? That’s it? I’ve followed you daily for six months and this is how it ends? How did we go from your last, banal entry to your death 4 days later? What happened? I was really mad, a testament to the power of the diary, I suppose.

Decades after the first time I read the diary, I had new questions. What did the diary mean or represent to her if she did not record her suffering? Did she fear that Leonard would read her diary and intervene? Or, dreadful thought, to what extent was the diary performative, written with future readers in mind? Whatever the explanation for her last entry, the passage of time affords no greater advantage for understanding her state of mind than what Leonard and Vanessa possessed at the time.

Right away, I pulled out the last volume of her letters to search for insight there. By early March, 1941, Leonard and her sister Vanessa Bell had recognized the warning signs of Virginia’s imminent descent into psychosis. Leonard’s tried and true method of restoring her to health — rest, confinement to bed, no visitors, calling in a specialist — wasn’t having its usual healing effect. Husband and sister underestimated how far down she had already descended into madness. On March 20, Vanessa, who still grieved the loss of her eldest son, Julian, as well as a close friend, Roger Fry, in the previous 3 years, came over from Charleston to reason with her sister. She urged Virginia to trust Leonard once again, just as Virginia had done in the past when her mental health collapsed. Vanessa then returned to Charleston and immediately wrote what would be her last letter to her sister.

You’re in the state when one never admits whats the matter — but you must not go and get ill right now. What shall we do when we’re invaded if you are a helpless invalid — what should I have done all these last 3 years if you hadnt been able to keep me alive and cheerful.2

Yet, by March 24, when she wrote in her diary for the last time, Virginia had already drafted two letters to Leonard in which she owned up to her psychological deterioration and said goodbye. She told him she had begun to hear voices. She knew she would not be able to save herself that time. Within a couple of days, she would draft the final version. In another letter to Vanessa, she replied to her sister’s plea to take care of herself. Virginia came clean:

You can’t think how I loved your letter. But I feel that I have gone too far this time to come back again. I am certain now that I am going mad again. It is just as it was the first time, I am always hearing voices, and I know I shant get over it this time.

All I want to say is that Leonard has been so astonishingly good, every day, I can’t imagine that anyone could have done more for me than he has. We have been perfectly happy until the last few weeks, when this horror began. Will you assure him of this?

I was shaken by the discrepancy between the diary and Virginia’s last letters to Leonard and Vanessa. In sympathy with all three of them, I felt my heart break as if all this was news I’d never expected.

I first read Virginia Woolf’s novels around the time I graduated from high school in the early ‘70s. When the volumes of her diary and letters began to appear in print, my interest shifted from her fiction to her private writing. You might attribute my fickle interest to the purience of literary celebrity stalking, but you’d be wrong. Or partially wrong. It wasn’t only that I found the language she used in her diary and letters bewitching. She’s profound, amusing, enraging, but always sharp and insightful. I also found the humanity on display in the diary to be far more compelling than in her fiction. For a long time, I felt self-conscious for feeling that and guilty for valuing her diary more than her novels.

I felt like a dilettante. How serious a reader can I be if modernist novels — hers, James Joyce’s, and William Faulkner’s — bore me?3 Eventually, I accepted that I am what Virginia would have called a Common Reader, someone who reads novels and essays solely for pleasure and personal insight. In other words, I am the kind of reader, in fact, that Virginia wrote for, even if she hoped her novels would be deemed accessible to the common reader. Indeed, most readers outside of academia and literary journalism are Common Readers. Only, she would have judged me a lazy reader for my resistance to her fictional subtleties.

I now accept and celebrate that I am a lazy Common Reader.4 I am not interested in literary theory or criticism. I like to think I read closely, carefully, and thoughtfully. My friends and I enjoy talking about books. I may not know all the rules, but I’m more interested in the game than the refereeing.

If, today, I find her novels a chore to read, I am nevertheless deeply grateful for the influence she had on subsequent generations of fiction writers. It’s hard for me to imagine Teju Cole’s Open City, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, or Zadie Smith’s The Fraud without her work and that of other modernists. But I lack the conceptual vocabulary that would allow me to explain why those more recent non-linear, multi-perspective works appeal to me much more than Woolf’s novels do.

In the days after I finished the diary, by chance I came across another novelist on whose work Virginia Woolf had a major influence: Toni Morrison. In a new book about her life as editor, I learned that Morrison attended graduate school in American literature at Cornell University. Her master’s thesis, completed in 1955, was entitled “Virginia Woolf’s and William Faulkner’s Treatment of the Alienated.”5 That came as a surprise. I now perceive a line of descent from To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to Morrison’s brilliant novel, Beloved (1987). Similarly, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, in which the character Thomas Cromwell’s consciousness is interwoven into the narrative of his social world, is similarly in debt to Woolf’s modernist style.

My high estimation of Virginia Woolf’s diary withstood a second reading later in life. Its impact on me at a young age endured and was validated by my return to her private world. However, now I wonder just how private it was. Virginia’s biographer reports that she directed Leonard to burn her diary after her death. Did she really think he would? Even I, who was born fourteen years after her death and never met any of them, would have predicted he wouldn’t. Leonard protected her creativity while she was alive. It’s hard to imagine she believed he would stop doing so after her death. Does her instruction reveal a touch of false modesty in her? I’ll think about that for another decade. Then, perhaps I will start the diary all over again.

Before I go, here’s one last, lovely glimpse of Virginia’s singing stream of consciousness:

Oh & I thought, as I was dressing, how interesting it would be to describe the approach of age, & the gradual coming of death. As people describe love. To note every symptom of failure: But why failure? To treat age as an experience that is different from the others; & to detect every one of the gradual stages towards death which is a tremendous experience, & not as unconscious at least in its approaches, as birth is.

1 For an appreciation of VW’s diary, its reissue, and its impact by Woolf’s biographer, Hermione Lee: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/22/the-diary-of-virginia-woolf-review-a-book-for-the-ages.

2 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1936-1941, Volume 6, fn 2, 485.

3 However, Virginia Woolf, too, was bored by Joyce.

4 What’s more, I would wager few people read Virginia Woolf’s novels for pleasure outside of university precincts.

5 Dana A. Williams, Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship (2025), 20.