“Lounsberry is the only scholar to treat Woolf’s diaries for themselves—as works of art, as expressions of her private self, and as testing grounds for her experiments in
novel-writing.”—Panthea Reid, author of Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles
“Offers a fascinating alternative form of biography. Lounsberry is particularly skillful in combining close attention to and interpretation of the details of Woolf’s diary with a fluent sense
of her life being lived across the years.”—Mark Hussey, author of Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers, and Common Readers to Her Life, Work, and
Critical Reception
Praise for Becoming Virginia Woolf:
“Foundational.”—Woolf Studies Annual
“[A] vital study.”—Choice
In this second volume of her acclaimed study of Virginia Woolf’s multivolume diary, Barbara Lounsberry traces the English writer’s life through the thirteen diaries she kept from 1918 to
1929. During these interwar years, Woolf began penning many of her most famous works, including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and A Room of One’s Own.
Lounsberry shows how Woolf’s writing at this time was influenced by other diarists—Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Jonathan Swift, and Stendhal among them—and how she continued to use her
diaries as a way to experiment with form and her evolving modernist style.
