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This collection of previously unpublished material is an uneven experience, but it's quite hard to pinpoint why.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.

Commonplace Book

'...We spend so much of our time out of doors too, that we become sensitive to the various changes of temperature and aspect which mark the different hours of the day. If I lived here much longer I should get to understand the wonderful rise and swell and fall of the land. It is like some vast living thing, and all its insects and animals, save man, are exquisitely in time with it. If you lie on the earth somewhere you hear a sound like a vast breath, as though it were the very inspiration of earth herself, and all the living things on her.'

from Life in the Fields, a piece in the 1903 diary in A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals by Virginia Woolf

Commonplace Book

'The neighbourhood of the Cathedral though is depressing. So much ancient stone however fairly piled, and however rich with the bodies of Saints and famous men, seems to suck the vitality of its humble neighbours. It is like a great forest oak; nothing can grow healthily beneath its shade.

All this is a form of heresy I know. A long walk in the sun, all along the valley too, leaves one little appetite to appreciate the value of the picture from an aesthetic point of view. A bare hilltop would have pleased me better than all the Closes and Cathedrals in England - '

from Salisbury Cathedral, a piece in the 1903 diary in A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals by Virginia Woolf