Book review: ‘The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5’

This final volume of Virginia Woolf’s diary takes us from the year 1936 to a few days before her suicide in 1941.

During this period, Woolf published her novel The Years; a major essay, Three Guineas; and a biography of her late friend the artist Roger Fry. She also wrote her posthumously published novel Between the Acts. This volume also records the deaths of a number of Woolf’s friends, including Julian Bell (killed in the Spanish Civil War), Ottoline Morell, and Ka[therine] Cox.

This was a momentous time in British and European history, encompassing the abdication crisis; Spanish Civil War; Nuremberg Rally; Munich Agreement; and major events in the opening years of the Second World War, including the invasions of Norway, the Low Countries, and France; the retreat from Dunkirk; the Battle of Britain; and the Blitz. Woolf comments on all these events in her diary. It was fascinating to read the contemporary thoughts of an intelligent, well-connected observer who had no idea how these famous events would pan out. We also read of how war affected Woolf directly: food rationing; experiencing air raids; watching aerial dogfights over the Sussex marshes; planning suicide with her Jewish husband, in the event of a German victory; and rescuing books and the previous volumes of her diary from her bombed-out flat in London: “rubble where I wrote so many books”.

Of all the volumes in this series, this one presents Woolf at her most sympathetic and interesting—although I very much enjoyed the series as a whole.