Virginia Woolf’s diary, 1926

I am blown like an old flag by my novel. This one is To the Lighthouse. I think it is worth saying for my own interest that at last, at last, after that battle…

I think I shall initiate a new convention for this book—beginning each day on a new page—my habit in writing serious literature. Certainly I have room to waste a…

As for Mary’s* party, there, save for the usual shyness about powder, paint, shoes and stockings, I was happy, owing to the supremacy of literature. This keeps us…

But what is to become of all these diaries, I asked myself yesterday. If I died, what would Leo make of them? He would be disinclined to burn them; he could not…

The last of a wet windy month, excepting the sudden opening of all the doors at Easter and the summer displayed blazing, as it always is, I suppose, only cloud…

I have finished—sketchily I admit—the second part of To the Lighthouse —and may, then, have it all written over by the end of July. A record. 7 months, if it so…

Women in tea garden at Bramber—a sweltering hot day: rose trellises; whitewashed tables; lower middle classes; motor omnibuses constantly passing; bits of grey…

The blessed thing is coming to an end I say to myself with a groan. It’s like some prolonged rather painful and yet exciting process of nature, which one desires…

I wished to add some remarks to this, on the mystical side of this solicitude; how it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with. It is this…

I am re-doing six pages of Lighthouse daily. This is not, I think, so quick as Mrs. D: but then I find much of it very sketchy and have to improvise on the…