A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909 by Virginia Woolf (1992)

This collection of previously unpublished material is an uneven experience, but it's quite hard to pinpoint why. The earliest journal, when the author was a precocious and slightly difficult fifteen-year-old, is utterly fascinating. Its simple evocation of cultured upper middle-class home life in West London in the 1890s is punctuated with revealing episodes where she admits to having behaved rather badly - it's clear that nerve-storms and tantrums were not unusual, and the family tiptoed around them to some extent. It also has family politics, notable comings and goings, and a little bitchiness to keep its sap high. Subsequent sections are not as enthralling, apart from occasional insights. The 1903 essays are surprisingly flat somehow, even though they represent that famous ferment of mind at its very beginning. Her nostalgic visit to Cornwall in 1905 resonates, as it was source material for the last part of To the Lighthouse, and because it reveals strongly how she fed on the approval and fascination of the locals at the return of the famous Stephens after such a long break subsequent to her mother's death. The travel journals are sporadically beautiful; the absence of any comment on her brother Thoby's death after their Greek trip in 1906 tells the story of what wasn't communicable and indeed how partial this record is, as is its final effect.