Selected Diaries: Virginia Woolf (Vintage Classics)

A moving, perceptive and beautifully written insight into the workings of the mind of one of the best loved and most admired writers of the twentieth century.

Virginia Woolf turned to her diary as to an intimate friend, to whom she could freely and spontaneously confide her thoughts on public events or the joys and trials of domestic life. Between 1st January 1915 and her death in 1941 she regularly recorded her thoughts with unfailing grace, courage, honesty and wit. The result is one of the greatest diaries in the English language.

Review

Her nephew Quentin Bell claims that the thirty volumes of Woolf’s diary are a masterpiece.Anne Olivier Bell has reduced them to a single volume. It think it is still a masterpiece — A.S. Byatt ― Evening Standard

I stick by the old heresy, that Woolf’s diary is her greatest achievement. An enthrallingly uncensored portrait of a brilliantly perceptive mind as it moves through a fascinating world in complex times — Alan Hollinghurst ― New York Times

One of the glories of our literature — Paul Levy

She made portraits exact, more clairvoyant, more living than those of any writer I know — P.N. Furbank

A work of the highest imaginative genius, with powers of perception and description unexampled in our time — Isaiah Berlin

About the Author

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born in London. She became a central figure in The Bloomsbury Group, an informal collective of British writers, artists and thinkers. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. She wrote many works of literature which are now considered masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves.

Quentin Bell, the younger son of Vanessa and Clive Bell, was born in 1910. He was a painter, sculptor, potter, author and art critic, and was Professor of Fine Art at the University of Leeds; Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford; and Professor of the History of Theory of Art at Sussex. His books include On Human Finery, Ruskin, Bloomsbury and the highly praised two-voulme Virginia Woolf: A Biography which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize and the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year. He lived most of his later life in Sussex, where he died in December 1996, age 86.