A Writer's Diary
By Virginia Woolf
 
First edition, first impression: London: The Hogarth Press, 1953.

Octavo. Original orange cloth, spine lettered in gilt, top edge stained orange. With the original pictorial dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell, priced 18s. net.

A very good copy, the binding square and firm, with a bookseller's label (Bowes & Bowes, Trinity Street, Cambridge) and a previous owner's bookplate (Gerda Bruford) to the front paste-down; an area of browning to the bottom corner of the front and rear paste-downs, with some moderate spotting and offsetting to the endpapers and the fore-edge of the textblock, the contents otherwise clean and bright throughout; a soft, unobtrusive crease to the bottom edge of a number of leaves, becoming progressively less conspicuous as the volume advances; board corners slightly knocked.

The dust jacket very good, unclipped, with some browning to the spine panel and edge wear concentrated at the spine head and the neighbouring area of the upper panel, where a couple of associated tears have been neatly repaired to the verso with tape; some moderate browning and spotting to the verso, otherwise very good.

Woolf began to keep a regular diary in 1915 and continued the practice until a few days before her death in 1941, leaving twenty-six manuscript volumes in her own hand. For the present volume, her husband and literary executor, Leonard Woolf, went carefully through those volumes and extracted the entries spanning 1918 to 1941 that bore on her own writing - among them entries touching on the composition of Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves - together with passages on her reading, her contemporaries, and the running of the Hogarth Press. First published by the Hogarth Press in 1953, with a dust jacket designed by Woolf's sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, the volume remains a primary source for the study of Woolf's compositional method, offering, in the words used to advertise it on publication, "a very remarkable insight into the mind and method" of a major twentieth-century novelist.