A Writer's Diary

I've just finished ploughing through the blustery pages of Woolf's A Writer's Diary. It feels like she lived such a cyclical existence, falling from one book to another; first draft, second draft, layout, publication, she waited for the fallout and then started again. I never realised how prolific she was, how much fiction and how much literary criticism she wrote. I love the entries where she describes forming a book in her mind, as without word-processing the action of moving from thought to page is radically transformed; the novel much imagined before words hit paper. There is so many things to say about this book: it informs us technically about the different stages of her writing process, illustrates how she reads - the classics, falling like rain- how she lives, moving from country to town and the book also contains jewelled morcels of descriptive prose that could be framed and hung upon the wall.