Travel, Reading, walking in London or in the Sussex countryside, daily life with her husband, Leonard, writing, migraines and fits of melancholy … Held between 1915 and 1941, the journal of the great English is a monument.
–Virginia Woolf has been at the top of the Trinity of intimate writing for decades, surrounded by Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath, joined by Catherine Pozzi and Alejandra Pizarnik. Let us add to these destinies, most of them shattered or tragic, those of Marie Lenéru, or of Katherine Mansfield, a close friend of the author of The Lighthouse Walk. Closer to home, novelist and diarist Joyce Carol Oates saw in the Journal the Woolf “The difficult transcription of everything that is uncertain, enigmatic, the feeling that writing is a triumphant act, the need to surrender to the unconscious (…), the pleasure taken in sounds, in cadences, in rhythm with the language”. A pleasure threatened by her obsessive doubts, she who was meticulous to the point of despair. Until we make the confession never shameless, in this perpetual dialogue with itself.
What do these thousands of pages, blacked out from 1915 to 1941, tell us? Daily life first, interspersed with a few trips to France or Italy:
