What sort of diary should i like mine to be

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Virginia Woolf, Diary 1, This is the main achievement of her book: in a straightforward and clear style, she interweaves diary-reading and diary-writing, successfully listing the common distinctive features Woolf shares with her fellow diarists. In this way, her life diary becomes in turn travel diary or sketchbook, a testing ground for landscape description, essays or portraits of family, friends and common people, but also the shrine of doubts, anger, hopes or questioning.

The entries are either titled, dated or unmarked, giving shape to an irregular and heterogeneous narrative. Through detailed rendering, Lounsberry shows the ever-evolving creation of a young writer in search of her own self as literary creator. Throughout her book, Barbara Lounsberry conjectures about what Virginia Stephen might have identified with, might have liked, or might have imitated.

And Lounsberry shows in what ways it can indeed be considered a literary matrix which nurtures typically Woolfian seminal ideas, themes and patterns. Still, Lounsberry unveils these persistent concerns throughout her chronological inquiry thus dooming her text to excessive repetition. On December 29th, , some eight years after her self-constructed brink of elderly age, she observes wistfully, aligning the desire to write in the diary with her writerly and existential vitality:.

There are moments when the sail flaps. A roll of barbed wire is hooped on the edge. I rubbed my mind brisk along the Newhaven road. Shabby old maids buying groceries, in that desert road with the villas; in the wet. And Newhaven gashed. But tire the body and the mind sleeps. All desire to write diary here has flagged. What is the right antidote? I must sniff round. I think Mme. Writing to be a daily pleasure. I detest the hardness of old age — I feel it.

I rasp. Exactly three months later, Woolf filled her pockets with stones, walked into the river near her home in Sussex, and drowned herself. The diary is too personal to be published as a whole during the lifetime of many people referred to in it. It is, I think, nearly always a mistake to publish extracts from diaries or letters, particularly if the omissions have to be made in order to protect the feelings or reputations of the living. The omissions almost always distort or conceal the true character of the diarist or letter-writer and produce spiritually what an Academy picture does materially, smoothing out the wrinkles, warts, frowns, and asperities.

The portrait is therefore from the start unbalanced, and, if someone then deliberately removes another characteristic, it may well become a mere caricature. The Marginalian participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon.

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