Virginia Woolf’s diary, 1933

This is a little out of place,* but then so am I. We are up for Angelica’s party last night and I have half an hour to spend before shooting in the new Lanchester…

It must be confessed that The Pargiters are like cuckoos in my nest—which should be Flush. I have only 50 pages to correct and send to Mabel; and these cursed…

Well, Flush lingers on and I cannot despatch him. That’s the sad truth. I always see something I could press tighter or enwrap more completely. There’s no trifling…

Well, Flush is, I swear, despatched. Nobody can say I don’t take trouble with my little stories. And now, having bent my mind for 5 weeks sternly this way, I must…

Not that I much want a move in March, with The Pargiters on my hands. I am going however to work largely, spaciously, fruitfully on that book. Today I…

It is an utterly corrupt society I have just remarked, speaking in the person of Elvira Pargiter, and I will take nothing that it can give me etc. etc.: Now, as…

The polite letters have been sent. So far I have [not] had, nor could have had, any answer. No, thank Heaven, I need not emerge from my fiction in July to have a…

Oh I’m so tired! I’ve written myself out over The Pargiters, this last lap. I’ve brought it down to Elvira in bed—the scene I’ve had in my mind ever so many months,…

That’s all over—our ten days: and I wrote daily, almost, at Goldsmith—don’t much see the point of my Goldsmiths and so on—and read Goldsmith, and so on. Yes: I…

A mere note. We got out of the car last night and began walking down to the Serpentine. A summer evening. Chestnuts in their crinolines, bearing tapers; grey green…

Yes, I thought, I will make a note of that face—the face of the woman stitching a very thin, lustrous green silk at a table in the restaurant where we lunched at…

Yes, Shelley chose better than Max Beerbohm. He chose a harbour; a bay; and his home, with a balcony, in which Mary stood, looks out across the sea. Sloping sailed…

Yes, I am reading—skipping—the Sacred Fount, about the most inappropriate of all books for this din—sitting by the open window, looking across heads and heads and…

This should be all description—I mean of the little pointed green hills; and the white oxen and the poplars and the cypresses and the sculptured shaped infinitely…

It’s a queer thing that I write a date. Perhaps in this disoriented life one thinks, if I can say what day it is, then . . . Three dots to signify I don’t know what…

To write to keep off sleep—that is the exalted mission of tonight—tonight sitting at the open window of a second-rate inn in Draguignan—with plane trees outside,…

I have just said to myself if it were possible to write, those white sheets would be the very thing, not too large or too small. But I do not wish to write, except…

I think I have now got to the point where I can write for four months straight ahead at The Pargiters. Oh the relief—the physical relief! I feel as if I could…

Bella* arrived and knocked her head upon the window of the car. She cut her nose and was dazed. And then I was in “one of my states”—how violent, how acute—and…

I am again in full flood with The Pargiters after a week of very scanty pages. The trouble is to get the meat pressed in: I mean to keep the rhythm and convey the…

So naturally after Mrs. Nef I was so tired—I shivered and shook. I went to bed for 2 days and slept I daresay 7 hours, visiting the silent realms again. It strikes…

And owing to Sir Alan Cobham’s flying and Angelica and Julian and fetching the boat I had another headache and bed and didn’t see Ethel, but heard her voice and…

A week ago, on Friday to be precise, having got my mind again, I dipped into The Pargiters and determined to sweat it bare of flesh before going on, accumulating…

Suddenly in the night I thought of Here and Now as a title for the Pargiters. I think it better. It shows what I’m after and does not compete with the Herries Saga,…

Why not, one of these days, write a fantasy on the theme of Crabbe?—a biographical fantasy—an experiment in biography. I had so much of the most profound interest…

It’s October now; and we have to go to Hastings Conference tomorrow and Wednesday, to Vita, then back to London. I opened this in order to make one of my…

No, my head is too tired to go on with Bobby and Elvira—they’re to meet at St. Paul’s—this morning. I wish I could get it full and calm and unconscious. This last…

I was walking through Leicester Square—how far from China—just now when I read “Death of Noted Novelist” on the posters. And I thought of Hugh Walpole. But it is…

I finished part 4 of Here and Now yesterday and therefore indulge in a contemplative morning. To freshen my memory of the war, I read some old diaries.