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...

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