Misguided General

Hitler takes his first prize, the Rhineland, unopposed in March 1936. Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf fights her own dramatic inner war across that year. Her 1936 diary reveals, more clearly than any other of her diaries, the diary's foundational role in Woolf's artistic renewal—a role she does not fully understand. With great clarity, we also see the role of other diaries in her renewals in 1936. In August 1936, amid a dangerous illness, Woolf reads the diaries of Bertrand Russell's parents, Lord and Lady Amberley. She lives again in their world and takes direction for Three Guineas. In early November, she reads Ellen Weeton's Journal of a Governess, and, in December, the diaries of Stephen MacKenna, who translated the Greek philosopher Plotinus into a melodious English. She also makes use of these diaries as she writes Three Guineas.