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Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries and the Diaries She Read

Online ISBN:
9780813051833
Print ISBN:
9780813062952
Publisher:
University Press of Florida
Book

Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries and the Diaries She Read

Published:
8 November 2016
Online ISBN:
9780813051833
Print ISBN:
9780813062952
Publisher:
University Press of Florida

Abstract

Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path offers the first extensive treatment of Woolf’s second diary stage: her spare, modernist diaries written from 1918 to 1929. These thirteen middle diary books are explored in depth and Woolf's development as a diarist traced across what is often called her modernist golden age when she wrote her most famous works: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, and the first Common Reader. Woolf turns her semiprivate diary into a lean, inward-searching journal and practice ground for these great modernist works. The book offers close readings of each of the thirteen diaries: (1) as a work of art in itself; (2) as it relates to Woolf’s other diaries; and (3) as it intersects her public works (letters and published essays, reviews, fiction, and nonfiction.) Woolf's Modernist Path also offers a new approach to Woolf biography: her life as she marked it in her diary from ages 36 to 49. Here is Woolf at mid-life. New, too, is the importance of other diaries to Woolf’s creative life. Interwoven as she read them are fourteen key diaries—including those of Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, and Beatrice Webb—that helped shape both Woolf's semiprivate diary and her public prose.

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