At the end of the previous volume, 1924 was drawing to a close and the Woolfs about to leave for Rodmell for the festive season. And, as Virginia had predicted, it had been an eventful and fulfilling year – a new London home at 52 Tavistock Square, and all the delights a return to city living had to offer. She was mostly spared afflictions of body and mind, and signs of stress, and distress, had been relatively fleeting. The Hogarth Press is gaining in renown, and consequently demanding more of the Woolfs’ time – but it remains a labor of love and a respite from the long, solitary hours of reading and writing. Virginia had adhered to her stringent writing schedule for the last year; most of the writing of both Mrs. Dalloway and The Common Reader are done, and their publication pending in this year ahead. As a critic and an intellectual voice, her reputation is growing, and she is confident enough to stand her ground, in fact, relishes not just the discourse but the argument. New friendships are being tentatively tested, while many of the old still flourish – and some, not.
Virginia and Leonard returned to London on 2nd January, 1925. There are only two entries in what is still Diary XIII from the previous year, and which resumes on Tuesday 6th January, 1925, with strife with Nelly, and Virginia stating that servant questions no longer much worry her – when they clearly do! She writes “a note on an Elizabethan play” that will find published form in the TLS (5 March 1925) and The Common Reader, and that irrespective of the horrendous Christmas weather whilst at Rodmell, she got Mrs. Dalloway in order, and that it is now at the printers and she awaits the proofs. The next entry, on Wednesday 18 March, informs of having been in bed with influenza, and that she wrote the last page was there – final work for The Common Reader (from the footnote: the final paragraphs of “The Elizabethan Lumber Room”). Further, that she has made a new diary, and with “ominous forebodings at the sight of all the blank pages”, will now begin that. [pp. 3-5]
diary xiv: 18 march 1925-19 january 1926
52 TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON.
And, an emotional start it indeed is.
At the moment […] I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past…
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three, [p.5]
This suggested to her, during a visit with Vanessa to her children’s school in Reading, and an exchanged emotional greeting between Vanessa and Quentin on the railway platform:
This I shall remember; & make more of, when separated from all the business of crossing the platform, finding our bus &c. That is why we dwell on the past, I think.
[p.5]
I especially note the above, because I think it has become increasingly clear in her diary entries of the previous year or so how radically Woolf is now approaching her own emotional core, and its relationship to her physical person. And, how intent she is on finding a literary form to adequately describe the inner emotions, and her growing impatience at the hastily applied label of “sentimentality” by those too lazy to contemplate the difference.
An editor’s note [p.6] explains that the Woolf’s travelled to Cassis in the south of France via Newhaven-Dieppe and Paris on 26 March 1925, where they stayed at the Hotel Cendrillon; returning to London on 6/7 April. Virginia tells on Wednesday 8 April with sadness of Jacques Raverat’s death, and then, with reference to Montaigne, hauls herself back amongst the living and writes a pastiche of their stay in Cassis – of landscape, seascape, people, and feelings of contentment that border on a bliss that she does not quite trust.
On Monday 27 April, Woolf bemoans having heard not a word about The Common Reader (which was only published on the 23rd!) and is adamant this does not bother her! She is sitting for Vogue and contemplating Robert Graves. And hen, that which doesn’t bother her, bothers her again on 1 May:
…came out 8 days ago, […] not a single review […] no body has written to me or spoken to me about it or in any way acknowledged the fact of its existence […] all signs which point to a dull chill depressing reception; & complete failure […] if the same thing happens to Dalloway one need not be surprised …
Vol. 3 [pp.15-16]
But, throughout the next week, there is an increasing amount of attention – even when not exactly that which she would have hoped for: Vanessa’s bad cover (which of the below pictured versions is being referred to I don’t know), a debate about who and what exactly a “common reader is” – all of which increasingly irritates; making her feel “head achey”, she says.
19th July 1925: Woolf rattles off the “whole tribe of people & parties [that have] gone down the sink to oblivion”[p.34] in the last weeks – Tom, Clive & Mary, the ladies Colfax, Asquith, Oxford amongst others, and Maynard brought around a pamphlet – “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill” – (10,000 copies at 1/- she says, and the footnote says 7,000 were actually printed [p.35]). Through to the end of July work is brisk, and brisker Woolf’s planning for the impending retreat to Rodmell and what to do.
On Thursday 30th July, To the Lighthouse, and the coming to terms with excavating all the memories, especially those of her father, very much preoccupy her – the scope of her intentions seems to be expanding, and there is an idea “to split up emotions more completely”. [p.38] Maynard will be married on Tuesday, she says, and the footnote confirms that Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova were married at St. Pancras Registry Office on 4th August, 1925.
The Woolfs travel to Rodmell on Wednesday 5th August. On Sunday 16th August they lunch with the newly-wed Maynard and Lydia at Ilford, and on Wednesday 19th August bicycle to Charleston for Quentin’s fifteenth birthday – where the Keyneses are again in attendance. During dinner,Virginia fainted…
…and her next entry if on Saturday, 5th September. Again, illness has interrupted her best lain plans, but the stoic Virginia reemerges and takes command:
This has rammed a big hole in my 8 weeks which were to be stuffed so full. Never mind. Arrange whatever pieces come your way. Never be unseated by the shying of that undependable brute, life, hag ridden as she is by my own queer, difficult nervous system.
Vol. 3 [pp.38-39]
Irrespective, VW has got back to work on To the Lighthouse, and is trying to will her body to cooperate, but on 14th September she writes mid-morning from bed (which she has been in and out of) and the “bunch of nerves at the back of [her] neck” [p.40] do as they will. Some consideration is given to selling Monks House and spending summers in the South of France, but is only fleeting. Virginia is disillusioned again with Tom Eliot; finding out – and not from him – that “Waste Land” is to be re-published – and not by Hogarth! Through the rest of September she remains unwell, and even visits from those near and dear – Maynard, Lytton – seemingly leave her in a state of distress.
Returning to London on Friday 2nd October, VW is so unwell that the doctor is soon called upon. Through October and most of November she remains in a poor state; intermittently bedridden and only occasionally going for a walk or drive with Leonard, and having very few visitors. During this time, she writes an essay (“On Being Ill”) for Eliot’s New Criterion and a few reviews.
Woolf does not write in her diary again until 27 November; and then of the death of Madge Vaughan. How the years have changed the tone of that relationship.
Rustling among my emotions, I found nothing [but] dead leaves. Her letters had eaten away the reality […] Oh detestable time, that thus eats out the heart and lets the body go on. They buried a faggot of twigs at Highgate […]
Vol. 3 [p.46]
Brilliant as that passage may be, kind is it not. (Remembering well the extent and warmth of their early correspondence [see “The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume I”], I am unclear as to why that relationship turned so very sour. Do I recall a mounting generational tension not unlike that with Kitty Maxse?) Vita has visited twice, she says, and the very thought of her traipsing off to Persia is most unwelcome; an indication perhaps of their deepening intimacy. And, she goes on to ponder her friendships;
People die; Madge dies […& not a solitary tear] But then, if 6 people died, it is true that my life would cease […] Imagine Leonard, Nessa, Duncan, Lytton, Clive, Morgan all dead.
Vol. 3 [p.48]
Contemplating this entry in respect to an earlier ordering of affections only a half dozen years previously (see Vol. 1, 20 January 1919), it is clear that there are people that come and go in Virginia’s world, looser friendships perhaps or to the nth degree, but there is also this hard inner-core that remains constant, and one of whom is her husband and another her sister (who one notes with interest is the only woman).
On 7th December Virginia’s return to the world of the living (she’s reading, writing, walking) is mitigated by Vita having been in London and neither visited nor issued an invitation to “Long Barn”. And further so, by Tom Eliot’s dissatisfaction with “On Being Ill”, which both Woolfs liked very much. (Though there is no other evidence substantiating this – the said postcard having gone missing – and the essay was indeed published in The New Criterion in January 1926.) And history has confirmed that judgement, for it is an essay that has proved to have legs; and which is, today, one of her most admired and cited.
Monday 21st December: This entry reveals that Vita did in fact come through – Virginia stayed at “Long Barn” from the 17-20 December. The footnote further reveals this to have been “the beginning of their love affair”. [p.51] Woolf makes her admiration for Vita clear, and recognises her shortcomings:
I like her & being with her, & the splendour […] her maturity […] her being so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters […] her motherhood […] her being in short (what I have never been) a real woman.[…] In brain & insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this …
Vol. 3 [p.52]
The editor reports: Because of alterations being done at Monks House, the Woolfs went to Charleston on 22nd December and spent Christmas there with Vanessa and Clive and the three children. Roger Fry was there until the 24th December. Vanessa later tells Duncan Grant (who was not present) that they spent an evening reading VW’s diary recalling early days at 46 Gordon Square. Vita comes for lunch on Boxing Day, Leonard returned to London on the 27th and Virginia on 28th December.
And further: Almost immediately upon her return to Tavistock Square, VW was again very unwell and on 8th January German Measles was diagnosed. She was able, though, to attend a dinner with Leonard and Vita hosted by Clive at the “Ivy” on 18th January. VW did not write in her diary again until 19th January 1926, and this was to be the last entry made in Diary XIV. Interesting, is that the last two pages include a preliminary version of a lecture that VW was to give at a private girls’ school on 30th January, and which would later be published as “How Should one Read a Book”.
The final entry of this diary was made on Tuesday 19th January 1926, just after Clive’s dinner, and should be mentioned. More than anything, it is illustrative of Woolf’s present state of mind; and it being full of Vita Sackville-West!
Vita having this moment…left me, what are my feelings? […] I shall want her, clearly & distinctly. Then not & so on. This is the normal human feeling, I think. […] One wants that atmosphere – to me so rosy & calm. She is not clever; but abundant & fruitful; truthful too. […] I feel a lack of stimulus […] now Vita is gone; & some pathos, common to all these partings…
Vol. 3 [p.57]