Diaries written in adversity can be a source of solace

THE DIARIES of Virginia Woolf are bookended by wars. Early entries, written when she was a young novelist, describe sheltering in her kitchen during the now-forgotten air-raids over London in 1917. Over nearly three decades she would fill 26 volumes, usually settling down after tea to write up the day or, if she had been laid low by mental illness, as she often was, to recount events spanning weeks or months. Her observations of people, places and books are sometimes catty and prejudiced, often wry and incisive. In October 1940, an established modernist author living in Sussex, she chronicled another conflict:

I want to look back on these war years as years of positive something or other…Queer the contraction of life to the village radius. Wood bought enough to stock many winters. All our friends are isolated over winter fires. Chance of interruption small now. No cars. No petrol. Trains uncertain. And we on our lovely free autumn island.