11 December 1939 – 17 December 1939

The litter in this room is so appalling that it takes me five minutes to find my pen. R. all unsewn in bits. And I must take 50 pages, should be 100, up on Monday. Can’t get the marriage chapter right. Proportion all wrong. Alteration, quotation, makes it worse. But it’s true I don’t fuss quite so much as over a novel. I learned a lesson in re-writing The Years which I shall never forget. Always I say to myself Remember the horror of that. Yesterday I was, I suppose, cheerful. Two letters from admirers of Three Guineas: both genuine: one a soldier in the trenches; the other a distracted middle class woman.