Virginia Woolf, the War Without, the War Within

Virginia Woolf, The War Without, The War Within completes Lounsberry’s trilogy on Virginia Woolf’s luminous diary and the diaries she read. It offers the first treatment of Woolf’s final diary stage (1929–1941), in which she turned more to her diary—and to others' diaries—as the war pressures of the unfurling 1930s grew. It reveals her artistic wars within as the encroaching outer war (World War II) approached. For the first time, this book will explore each of Woolf’s 12 final diary books in depth and trace her final flowering as a diarist. We watch as Woolf increases her number of diary entries in the 1930s and uses her diary more and more as a morning prop (as well as a post-tea-time act). We see her wish to write a “meatier” diary in 1940: an “evening” diary for “Old Virginia.” Interwoven into her own diary as it unfolds are the 18 key diaries that helped shape both her semi-private diary style and her public prose, including the diaries of Leo and Countess Tolstoy, Dorothy Wordsworth, Guy de Maupassant, Alice James, and André Gide. This book functions as a new Woolf biography, marking her life through her diaries from age forty-seven to four days before her suicide in 1941. Additionally, a new reading of Woolf’s suicide is offered—one based on her diaries.