Becoming Virginia Woolf Her Early Diaries And The Diaries She Read [Hardcover]

Explores the history of Woolf's diaries, not only to reveal heretofore unremarked sources but also to trace her evolving sense of possibilities in diary-writing, possibilities which helped shape Woolf as a fiction writer. A must-read for devotees of Virginia Woolf.Panthea Reid, author of Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf

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This revealing book gives us a diarist with greater literary range than Pepys and affords us a second pleasure: the infinitely varied voices of the diaries Virginia read. They fascinate us as they fascinate her: those writers who encouraged, warned, comforted, and trained a developing genius.Nancy Price, author of Sleeping with the Enemy

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Lounsberrys deeply researched and gracefully written book shows not only Woolfs development into a great diarist but also her evolvement into the fiction and nonfiction writer revered today.Gay Talese, author of A Writers Life

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Encompassing thirty-eight handwritten volumes, Virginia Woolfs diary is her lengthiest and longest-sustained workand her last to reach the public. In the only full-length book to explore deeply this luminous and boundary-stretching masterpiece, Barbara Lounsberry traces Woolfs development as a writer through her first twelve diariesa fascinating experimental stage, where the earliest hints of Woolfs pioneering modernist style can be seen.

Starting with fourteen-year-old Woolfs 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 Woolfs diary parentsSir Walter Scott and Fanny Burney. These key literary connections open a new and indispensable window onto the story of one of literatures most renowned modernists.