Sun 23 June 1929

I now begin to see the Moths rather too clearly, or at least strenuously, for my comfort. I think it will begin like this: dawn; the shells on a beach; I dont know—voices of cock & nightingale; & then all the children at a long table-lessons. The beginning. Well, all sorts of characters are to be there. Then the person who is at the table can call out any one of them at any moment; & build up by that person the mood, tell a story; for instance about dogs or nurses; or some adventure of a childs kind; all to be very Arabian nights; & so on: this shall be Childhood; but it must not be my childhood; & boats on the pond; the sense of children; unreality; things oddly proportioned. Then another person or figure must be selected. The unreal world must be round all this—the phantom waves. The Moth must come in: the beautiful single moth. There must be a flower growing.

Could one not get the waves to be heard all through? Or the farmyard noises? Some odd irrelevant noises. She might have a book—one book to read in-another to write in—old letters.

Early morning light—but this need not be insisted on; because there must be great freedom from 'reality'. Yet everything must have relevance.

virginia woolf, diary

Mon 3 September 1928

… to be attached to her as daughter would be so cruel a fate that I can think of nothing worse; & thousands of women might be dying of it in England today: this tyranny of mother over daughter, or father; their right to the due being as powerful as anything in the world. And then, they ask, why women dont write poetry. Short of killing Mrs W. nothing could be done.

Day after day one's life would be crumpled up like a bill for 10 pen[ce] 3 farthings.

Nothing has ever been said of this.

virginia woolf, diary

October 1927

[...] having done my last article for the Tribune, & now being free again.
And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita [sackville-west]; only with a change about from one sex to another.

This is a book, I think I have said before, which I write after tea. [...] It is to be a small book, & written by Christmas.

I thought I could combine it with Fiction, but once the mind gets hot it cant stop; I walk making up phrases; sit, contriving scenes; am in short in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me; from which I have kept myself since last February, or earlier.
Talk of planning a book, or waiting for an idea! This one came in a rush; I said to pacify myself, being bored & stale with criticism, [...]

virginia woolf, diary

→

Thu 23 June 1927

Sibyl has dropped me: & I don't feel the fall.

[...]

I am distressed by my failure to make cigarettes. I had a lesson from a man in Francis Street—cant do a thing with my fingers. Angelica is expert with hers already. Nessa says all painters are: this is a perquisite they get thrown in with their gift.

virginia woolf, diary

Sat 11 December 1926

I also have made up a passage for The Lighthouse: on people going away & the effect on one's feeling for them.

virginia woolf, diary

Tue 23 November 1926

I am re-doing six pages of Lighthouse daily. This is not I think, so quick as Mrs D. [mrs dalloway]: but then I find much of it very sketchy, & have to improvise on the typewriter. This I find much easier than re-writing in pen & ink. My present opinion is that it is easily the best of my books, fuller than J's R. [jacob's room] & less spasmodic, occupied with more interesting things than Mrs D. & not complicated with all that desperate accompaniment of madness. It is freer & subtler I think. Yet I have no idea yet of any other to follow it: [...]

virginia woolf, diary

Sat 20 March 1926

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 publish them. Well, he should make up a book from them, I think; & then burn the body. I daresay there is a little book in them: if the scraps & scratches were straightened out a little. God knows.

This is dictated by a slight melancholia, which comes upon me sometimes now, & makes me think I am old: I am ugly. I am repeating things. Yet, as far as I know, as a writer I am only now writing out my mind.

virginia woolf, diary

Summer 1926

Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its "dailiness".

virginia woolf, diary

Sat 19 November 1925

But I dont think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness; but only reached now in middle age.

virginia woolf, diary