She kept in touch by letter- writing. Even after the telephone became easily available, the letter was her medium. She would write several on most days, of which about a fifth have survived….
‘ Nothing has really happened until it has been described. so you must write many letters to your family and friends, and keep a diary.’ Pain was relieved, and pleasure doubled, by recording it.
From Virginia ‘s diaries and letters we can know what she was doing almost every day. The diary was to her like a hammock, for contemplation; the letters were like a trampoline, for literary exercise and gossip. The dominant tone of the diary was melancholy; of the letters, provocation and delight. she showed the diary to no one, and many of the letters must have been put away after a single reading. The are evidence of how extraordinarily full her life had becoming in the closing years of the war.
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On Mrs Dalloway
She had hoped to change the whole direction of fiction- writing. She had already written in her diary: ‘ The method of writing smooth narrative can’ t be right. Things don’t happen in one’s mind like that. We experience all the time, an overlapping of images and ideas, and modern novels should convey our mental confusion instead of neatly rearranging it. The reader must sort it out. ‘
Quoted from Biography , Virginia Woolf by Neigel Nicolson.
