War Shades Life & Work

Though Woolf opposed the darkened waters of the dictators in 1938, in 1939, as the war edges closer, she can’t avoid letting it shade her life and work. On March 22, Madrid “surrender[s]” to the fascists (D 5: 211). The week before, Hitler marches into Prague and proclaims (Woolf writes) that “Czecko-Slovakia has ceased to exist).” Although Woolf's fluidity is affected, she remains bold. In January, she dons the mask of Cleopatra (perhaps ominously) for her brother Adrian's costume party. Using diary form, she starts her memoirs in April. And she continues her inner artistic struggle to resurrect Roger Fry. Across the year, she also seeks life enduring through her own diary—and in many other diaries as well. Some diarists aid her—like her diary-father, Sir Walter Scott. In January, Woolf wishes to also write on the remarkable journals of French painter Eugène Delacroix. However, in August, she finds, in F. L. Lucas's Journal Under the Terror, 1938, an invitation to noble suicide. In the Journals of Charles Ricketts, R. A., the brilliant outsider and friend of Michael Field, which she reads in late December, she meets a diary stopped by war.