On 3 August 1917, Virginia Woolf began writing a diary in a small book she kept at Asheham, the country house in Sussex where she stayed with a nurse and her husband, Leonard Woolf, to recover after a years-long sequence of illness, attempted suicide, and mental breakdowns. It had been two years without record. She wrote only in this diary for two months, until 4 October 1917, when she took up her longer diary upon returning to Richmond; however, she kept almost daily notes in the Asheham diary on subsequent visits to Sussex the following year, until 6 October 1918, when the diary stops, with about a third of the pages left blank. This is a stripped-down diary of what Woolf will later call moments of “non-being,” the unconsciously lived parts of every day in which “one walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done,” annotated here...
Elemental Suicide
LOUISE HORNBY is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she teaches courses on modernist and contemporary literature, photography, film, and visual culture, bridging the spaces between literary criticism and art history. Recently, she has written a series of essays about the weather, the elements, and non-possessive ecologies in contemporary visual art and literature. Her current book project takes up the postural, moral, and political implications of putting one foot in front of the other, paying particular attention to moments when something goes awry—missteps, stumbles, dizzy spells, falls, deviations, trespasses, and refusals.
Louise Hornby; Elemental Suicide. Representations 1 February 2025; 169 (1): 49–63. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2025.169.4.49
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