We were in London on Monday. I went to London Bridge. I looked at the river; very misty; some tufts of smoke, perhaps from burning houses. There was another fire on Saturday. Then I saw a cliff of wall, eaten out, at one corner; a great corner all smashed; a Bank; the Monument erect: tried to get a bus; but such a block I dismounted; and the second bus advised me to walk. A complete jam of traffic; for streets were being blown up. So by Tube to the Temple; and there wandered in the desolate ruins of my old squares: gashed; dismantled; the old red bricks all white powder, something like a builder’s yard. Grey dirt and broken windows. Sightseers; all that completeness ravished and demolished.
Sunday, January 26th.
A battle against depression, rejection (by Harpers of my story and Ellen Terry) routed today (I hope) by clearing out kitchen; by sending the article (a lame one) to N.S.: and by breaking into P.H. two days, I think, of memoir writing. This trough of despair shall not, I swear, engulf me. The solitude is great.
Rodmell life is very small beer. The house is damp. The house is untidy. But there is no alternative. Also days will lengthen. What I need is the old spurt. ‘Your true life, like mine, is in ideas’ Desmond said to me once. But one must remember one can’t pump ideas. I begin to dislike introspection: sleep and slackness; musing; reading; cooking; cycling: oh and a good hard rather rocky book - viz: Herbert Fisher. This is my prescription.
There’s a lull in the war. Six nights without raids. But Garvin says the greatest struggle is about to come - say in three weeks - and every man, woman, dog, cat, even weevil must girt their arms, their faith - and so on. It’s the cold hour, this: before the lights go up. A few snowdrops in the garden. Yes, I was thinking: we live without a future. That’s what’s queer: with our noses pressed to a closed door. Now to write, with a new nib, to Enid Jones.
Friday, February 7th.
Why was I depressed? I cannot remember. We have been to Charlie Chaplin. Like the milk girl we found it boring. I have been writing with some glow. Mrs Thrale is to be done before we go to Cambridge. A week of broken water impends.
Sunday, February 16th.
In the wild grey water after last week’s turmoil. I liked the dinner with Dadie best. All very lit up and confidential. I liked the soft grey night at Newnham. We found Pernel in her high ceremonial room, all polished and spectatorial. She was in soft reds and blacks. We sat by a bright fire. Curious flitting talk. She leaves next year. Then Letchworth - the slaves chained to their typewriters, and their drawn set faces and the machines - the incessant more and more competent machines, folding, pressing, gluing and issuing perfect books. They can stamp cloth to imitate leather. Our Press is up in a glass case. No country to look at. Very long train journeys. Food skimpy. No butter, no jam. Old couples hoarding marmalade and grape nuts on their tables. Conversation half whispered round the lounge fire. Elizabeth Bowen arrived two hours after we got back, and went yesterday: and tomorrow Vita; then Enid; then perhaps I shall re-enter one of my higher lives. But not yet.
Wednesday, February 26th.
My ‘higher life’ is almost entirely the Elizabethan play. Finished Poyntz Hall, the Pageant; the play - finally Between the Acts this morning.
Sunday, March 8th.
Just back from L.’s speech at Brighton. Like a foreign town: the first spring day. Women sitting on seats. A pretty hat in a teashop - how fashion revives the eye! And the shell encrusted old women, rouged, decked, cadaverous at the teashop. The waitress in checked cotton. No: I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James’ sentence: observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. This I see verges on introspection; but doesn’t quite fall in. Suppose I bought a ticket at the Museum; biked in daily and read history. Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age and wrote round and about. Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.
I scarcely ever read it. But, owing to his giving me the books, I am now reading C. by M. Baring. I am surprised to find it as good as it is. But how good is it? Easy to say it is not a great book. But what qualities does it lack? That it adds nothing to one’s vision of life, perhaps. Yet it is hard to find a serious flaw. My wonder is that entirely second rate work like this, poured out in profusion by at least 20 people yearly, I suppose, has so much merit. Never reading it, I get into the way of thinking it non-existent. So it is, speaking with the utmost strictness. That is, it will not exist in 2026; but it has some existence now, which puzzles me a little. Now Clarissa bores me; yet I feel this is important. And why?
My own brain Here is a whole nervous breakdown in miniature. We came on I daresay that gives me more substantial pleasure than any letter I’ve had about any book. Yes, I think it does, coming from Morgan. For one thing it gives me reason to think I shall be right to go on along this very lonely path. I mean in the City today I was thinking of another book - about shopkeepers, and publicans, with low life scenes: and I ratified this sketch by Morgan’s judgement. Dadie agrees too. Oh yes, between 50 and 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody at last the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning - if The Waves is my first work in my own style! To be noted, as curiosities of my literary history: I sedulously avoid meeting Roger and Lytton whom I suspect do not like The Waves.
I am working very hard - in my way, to furbish up two long Elizabethan articles to front a new Common Reader: then I must go through the whole long list of those articles. I feel too, at the back of my brain, that I can devise a new critical method; something far less stiff and formal than these Times articles.
The Delphi Classics Catalogue
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Series One
Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D.H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Gaskell
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
George Eliot
H. G. Wells
Henry James
Ivan Turgenev
Jack London
James Joyce
Jane Austen
Joseph Conrad
Leo Tolstoy
Louisa May Alcott
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Walter Scott
The Brontës
Thomas Hardy
Virginia Woolf
Wilkie Collins
William Makepeace Thackeray
Series Two
Alexander Pushkin
Alexandre Dumas (English)
Andrew Lang
Anthony Trollope
Bram Stoker
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
Edith Wharton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
G. K. Chesterton
Gustave Flaubert (English)
H. Rider Haggard
Herman Melville
Honoré de
Balzac (English)
J. W. von Goethe (English)
Jules Verne
L. Frank Baum
Lewis Carroll
Marcel Proust (English)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nikolai Gogol
O. Henry
Rudyard Kipling
Tobias Smollett
Victor Hugo
William Shakespeare
Series Three
Ambrose Bierce
Ann Radcliffe
Ben Jonson
Charles Lever
Émile Zola
Ford Madox Ford
Geoffrey Chaucer
George Gissing
George Orwell
Guy de Maupassant
H. P. Lovecraft
Henrik Ibsen
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Fielding
J. M. Barrie
James Fenimore Cooper
John Buchan
John Galsworthy
Jonathan Swift
Kate Chopin
Katherine Mansfield
L. M. Montgomery
Laurence Sterne
Mary Shelley
Sheridan Le Fanu
Washington Irving
Series Four
Arnold Bennett
Arthur Machen
Beatrix Potter
Bret Harte
Captain Frederick Marryat
Charles Kingsley
Charles Reade
G. A. Henty
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Wallace
E. M. Forster
E. Nesbit
George Meredith
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jerome K. Jerome
John Ruskin
Maria Edgeworth
M. E. Braddon
Miguel de Cervantes
M. R. James
R. M. Ballantyne
Robert E. Howard
Samuel Johnson
Stendhal
Stephen Crane
Zane Grey
Series Five
Algernon Blackwood
Anatole France
Beaumont and Fletcher
Charles Darwin
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Edward Gibbon
E. F. Benson
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Bernard Shaw
George MacDonald
Hilaire Belloc
John Bunyan
John Webster
Margaret Oliphant
Maxim Gorky
Oliver Goldsmith
Radclyffe Hall
Robert W. Chambers
Samuel Butler
Samuel Richardson
Sir Thomas Malory
Thomas Carlyle
William Harrison Ainsworth
William Dean Howells
William Morris
Series Six
Anthony Hope
Aphra Behn
Arthur Morrison
Baroness Emma Orczy
Captain Mayne Reid
Charlotte M. Yonge
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
E. W. Hornung
Ellen Wood
Frances Burney
Frank Norris
Frank R. Stockton
Hall Caine
Horace Walpole
One Thousand and One Nights
R. Austin Freeman
Rafael Sabatini
Saki
Samuel Pepys
Sir Issac Newton
Stanley J. Weyman
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Middleton
Voltaire
William Hazlitt
William Hope Hodgson
Ancient Classics
Aeschylus
Apuleius
Apollonius of Rhodes
Aristophanes
Aristotle
Arrian
Bede
Cassius Dio
Catullus
Cicero
Demosthenes
Diodorus Siculus
Diogenes Laërtius
Euripides
Frontius
Herodotus
Hesiod
Hippocrates
Homer
Horace
Josephus
Julius Caesar
Juvenal
Livy
Longus
Lucan
Lucretius
Marcus Aurelius
Martial
Nonnus
Ovid
Pausanias
Petronius
Pindar
Plato
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Younger
Plotinus
Plutarch
Polybius
Propertius
Quintus Smyrnaeus
Sallust
Sappho
Seneca the Younger
Sophocles
Statius
Suetonius
Tacitus
Terence
Theocritus
Thucydides
Tibullus
Virgil
Xenophon
Delphi Poets Series
A. E. Housman
Alexander Pope
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Andrew Marvell
Beowulf
Charlotte Smith
Christina Rossetti
D. H Lawrence (poetry)
Dante Alighieri (English)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Delphi Poetry Anthology
Edgar Allan Poe (poetry)
Edmund Spenser
Edward Lear
Edward Thomas
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Emily Dickinson
Ezra Pound
Friedrich Schiller (English)
George Herbert
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Isaac Rosenberg
Johan Ludvig Runeberg
John Clare
John Donne
John Dryden
John Keats
John Milton
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Lord Byron
Ludovico Ariosto
Luís de Camões
Matthew Arnold
Michael Drayton
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Robert Browning
Robert Burns
Robert Frost
Robert Southey
Rumi
Rupert Brooke
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sir Philip Sidney
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Walter Raleigh
Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Gray
Thomas Hardy (poetry)
Thomas Hood
T. S. Eliot
W. B. Yeats
Walt Whitman
Wilfred Owen
William Blake
William Cowper
William Wordsworth
Masters of Art
Caravaggio
Claude Monet
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Diego Velázquez
Eugène Delacroix
Gustav Klimt
J. M. W. Turner
Johannes Vermeer
John Constable
Leonardo da Vinci
Michelangelo
Paul Cézanne
Paul Klee
Peter Paul Rubens
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Sandro Botticelli
Raphael
Rembrandt van Rijn
Titian
Vincent van Gogh
Wassily Kandinsky
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Woolf took her own life in the River Ouse in East Sussex
A plaque signalling where Woolf’s ashes were scattered outside Monk´s House, Lewes, East Sussex. The inscription reads, “Beneath this tree are buried the ashes of Virginia Woolf. Born January 25 1882, Died March 28 1941. Death is the enemy. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding o Death! The waves broke on the shore”.
Table of Contents
The Novels
THE VOYAGE OUT
NIGHT AND DAY
JACOB’S ROOM
MRS. DALLOWAY
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
ORLANDO
THE WAVES
FLUSH
THE YEARS
BETWEEN THE ACTS
The Short Stories
LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
The Play
FRESHWATER
The Non-Fiction
THE COMMON READER: FIRST SERIES
THE COMMON READER: SECOND SERIES
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
LONDON ESSAYS
WALTER SICKERT: A CONVERSATION
THREE GUINEAS
THE DEATH OF THE MOTH AND OTHER ESSAYS
THE MOMENT AND OTHER ESSAYS
ROGER FRY: A BIOGRAPHY
ON BEING ILL
THE CAPTAIN’S DEATH BED AND OTHER ESSAYS
GRANITE AND RAINBOW
BOOKS AND PORTRAITS
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 594
