Overview

Encompassing thirty-eight handwritten volumes, Virginia Woolf’s diary is her lengthiest and longest-sustained work, and the last to reach the public. In the only full-length work to deeply explore this luminous and boundary-stretching masterpiece, Barbara Lounsberry traces Woolf’s development as a writer through her first twelve diaries, a fascinating experimental stage, where the earliest hints of Woolf’s pioneering modernist style can be seen. Starting with fourteen-year-old Woolf’s first palm-sized leather diary, Becoming Virginia Woolf illuminates how her private and public writing was shaped by the diaries of other writers including Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, the French Goncourt brothers, Mary Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Woolf’s “diary parents” Sir Walter Scott and Fanny Burney. These key literary connections open a new and indispensable window onto the story of one of literature’s most renowned modernists.

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9780813049915

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[A] vital study. Choice

A significant contribution to the discussion of Woolf s work. It helps us understand Woolf s development as a writer in a way that sees experimentation (and any imperfections that occur in experimentation) as an important part of her development rather than seeing them as failures. English Literature in Transition

Lounsberry ultimately helps us see, through her close attention to what she calls the first of three phases in Woolf's diary-keeping, how the Virginia Woolf we know actually became that writer. This book is foundational, one the rest of us will depend on for a long time. --Woolf Studies Annual A significant contribution to the discussion of Woolf's work. It helps us understand Woolf's development as a writer in a way that sees experimentation (and any imperfections that occur in experimentation) as an important part of her development rather than seeing them as failures. --English Literature in Transition [A] vital study. --Choice

Author Information

Barbara Lounsberryis professor emerita of English at the University of Northern Iowa. She is the author of The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction and co-editor of Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality.

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