Virginia Woolf, the War Without, the War Within

“Lounsberry establishes how central to Woolf’s personal and creative being was diary-writing.”—Panthea Reid, author of Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf  

“A tour de force. Insightfully retraces Woolf’s movement from joyful confidence to restless struggles, persuasively illustrates the antiwar nature of all of Woolf’s work during the 1930s, and movingly interprets Woolf’s last diary entry.”—Beth Rigel Daugherty, coeditor of Approaches to Teaching Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”  

In Lounsberry’s third and final volume on Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Virginia Woolf, the War Without, the War Within: Her Final Diaries and the Diaries She Read reveals new insights about the courageous last years of the modernist writer’s life, from 1929 until Woolf’s suicide in 1941. Woolf turned more to her diary—and to the diaries of others—for support in these years as she engaged in inner artistic wars, including the struggle with her most difficult work, The Waves, and as the threat of fascism in the world outside culminated in World War II.

During this period, the war began to bleed into Woolf’s diary entries. Woolf writes about Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin; copies down the headlines of the day; and captures how war changed her daily life. Alongside Woolf’s own entries, Lounsberry explores the diaries of 18 other writers as Woolf read them, including the diaries of Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Wordsworth, Guy de Maupassant, Alice James, and André Gide. Lounsberry shows how reading diaries was both respite from Woolf’s public writing and also an inspiration for it. Tellingly, shortly before her suicide Woolf had stopped reading them completely.

The outer war and Woolf’s inner life collide in this dramatic conclusion to the trilogy that resoundingly demonstrates why Virginia Woolf has been called “the Shakespeare of the diary.” Lounsberry’s masterful study is essential reading for a complete understanding of this extraordinary writer and thinker and the development of modernist literature.

Barbara Lounsberry is professor emerita of English at the University of Northern Iowa. She is the author of Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read and Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries and the Diaries She Read.