Woolf kept a diary. She also kept draft notebooks for her novels and the
essays she wrote alongside them. The reading notebooks are a third kind
of notebook, more casual than either of these. Volume 19 is a notebook
with cardboard covers, reinforced inside and out on the spine with
cloth. Two pairs of metal grommets on the front and back permit it to be
bound with laces (and there is a very heavy shoelace attached here,
though no longer binding the pages). Inside, are over 100 loose pages,
each with two holes. This permitted Woolf to unbind pages from old
notebooks and pull old notes as she was revising and expanding
essays—for her Common Readers, say. As Silver points out, this can make
dating notebooks extraordinarily difficult, as a single notebook (like
notebook 26) may contain pages from 1919, 1920 or 21, 1926, 1928, 1935,
and 1938.
- Anne Fernald
descensus Averno facilis est