From lareviewofbooks.org
Cynthia Zarin traces the rise of fascism through the diary entries of Virginia Woolf, in an essay from LARB Quarterly no. 47: “Security.”
VIRGINIA WOOLF BEGAN KEEPING a diary in 1897, when she was 14. At the time of her death in 1941, at 59, her diaries numbered over 30 handwritten volumes. A collection of excerpts, compiled by her husband, Leonard Woolf, as A Writer’s Diary, appeared in 1953. In the 1970s, the diaries in their entirety began to appear, beautifully edited and annotated by Anne Olivier Bell, the wife of Woolf’s nephew, Quentin Bell.
The portrait Woolf’s diaries present is of a woman of exceptional discernment who, alongside her creative genius, had a genius for living: a life of family visits and fierce attachments, love affairs, excursions, small triumphs and mishaps, fine weather and rain, and writing, always writing. Between 1915 and 1941, despite bouts of illness that could keep her in bed for weeks, Woolf wrote nine novels, five books of essays, countless reviews and articles, a play, and five volumes of letters. And along the way, it turns out, she traced the rise of fascism: from month to month, and year by year, Woolf first recorded Hitler’s bloviations, then her growing terror. Leonard Woolf was Jewish. By 1941, when she took her own life, the signs indicated that Germany would invade England. When Hitler’s secret “Black Book” was discovered after the war, it listed 2,820 people who would be immediately arrested and handed over to the Gestapo when Britain was invaded and occupied. Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s names were both on it.
To recognize a tyrant, it helps to have some experience with tyranny. A daughter of the 19th century, Woolf knew coercion when she saw it. Written during Hitler’s rise to power, her late novel The Years (1937) and her book-length anti-war essay Three Guineas (1938)—a rebuke to militarism, patriarchy, and totalitarianism—delineate how the structure of the family can suppress and extinguish the spirit of persons who grow up in its vise, and both texts underscore how domestic tyranny is ever visible in the pitiless mirror of public life.
It’s not difficult to step from the querulous, demanding Mr. Ramsay of Woolf’s 1927 novel To The Lighthouse—modelled on her own father, the literary historian Leslie Stephen, who became a wheedling tyrant to his daughters after the death of their mother—to Colonel Pargiter, the patriarch of The Years, who terrorizes his children simply by entering a room. For it is Mr. Ramsay and Colonel Pargiter who hold the purse strings, opened to reward the obedient and closed to punish the unruly. The Years begins in 1880 and ends at the “Present Day.” After a series of experimental novels, the book is Woolf’s attempt at realism; perhaps because of this, it’s her most subtly strange and hallucinatory book, as reality at close range tends to yield unsettling visions and surprises—as does any acute record of everyday life. And it is only a step from tyrants like Mr. Ramsay and Colonel Pargiter, fulminating and terrorizing the drawing room in domestic displays of authoritarianism, to a grasping president who wants to be king.
Reading is a curious thing. A book read in a happy fog is one thing; the same pages when the world has turned to ash can be another. I’d read A Writer’s Diary as a teenager, highlighting phrases in yellow marker until the book looked like a honeycomb, but last September, for no reason I can pinpoint exactly, I began reading the unexcerpted volumes of Woolf’s diaries, one by one. At the time, my own anxiety around the November election was growing, not helped by doomscrolling, talking of nothing else, and reading the tea leaves of the polls. As I read, I began to follow a darkening thread woven into the diaries’ shimmering weft of days.
The first mention in the diary of the world starting to skitter is Friday, April 28, 1933. Bruno Walter, the conductor of the Leipzig Orchestra, has just left Germany, a few years after Hitler began decrying the presence of Jewish conductors at the Berlin State Opera. The Woolfs meet him through a mutual friend. She records that Walter “is very nearly mad; that is, he can’t get ‘the poison’ as he called it of Hitler out of him.” He continues, in her recounting:
“You must not think of the Jews,” he kept on saying. “You must think of this awful reign of intolerance. You must think of the whole state of the world. It is terrible—terrible. That this meanness, that this pettiness, should be possible! Our Germany, which I loved, with our tradition, our culture. We are now a disgrace!”
On July 2, 1934, on a hot summer day, before Woolf leaves for an outing with Leonard’s nieces and nephews to the London Zoo, a friend, the writer Osbert Sitwell, telephones. After discussing luncheons and publishers, he bursts out, “[C]an’t anything be done about this monstrous affair in Germany?” Three days before, on June 30, an estimated 1,200 people had been put to death without trial; Bell writes in the notes that among them were people “whom Hitler feared or disliked and seized the opportunity of eliminating—General Kurt von Schleicher, his predecessor as Chancellor of the German Reich, who with his wife was shot ‘resisting arrest’ at his Berlin flat.” Back from the zoo, Woolf records the sensation of cognitive dissonance:
[T]rying, how ineffectively, to express the sensation of sitting here & reading, like an act in a play, how Hitler flew to Munich & killed this that & the other man & woman in Germany yesterday. […] Meanwhile these brutal bullies go about […] like little boys dressed up, acting this idiotic, meaningless, brutal, bloody, pandemonium.
April 1935 finds the Woolfs planning a trip to the continent. She writes, “It is now almost settled that we shall drive through Holland & Germany, concealing Leonard’s nose.” In May, accompanied by their pet marmoset, Mitz, they drive into Germany. The car in front of them at the border crossing has a swastika on its rear window. In Unkel, banners are strung along the road: “The Jew is our enemy.” As they drive, every village has a painted sign: “Juden sind hier unwunscht.” They spend the summer in the country in Sussex; back in London, on November 20, Leonard is woken up by a man shouting abuses in German under his bedroom window; the Woolfs discuss whether to inform the police. On March 13, 1936, Hitler marches into the demilitarized area of the Rhineland, in violation of the Versailles and Locarno treaties. After a dinner party conversation that evening, Woolf records “a touching belief in English intellectuals” to make sense of current affairs. “But it’s odd,” she continues, “how near the guns have got to our private life again. […] [E]ven though I go on, like a doomed mouse, nibbling at my daily page.” In November, at tea, Lord Cecil, champion of the League of Nations, exclaims: “To tell us that we are to submit to Hitler! Do what Hitler tells us!”
At the turn of 1937, she is reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Her novel The Years is published; The Times of London proclaims it a masterpiece. On July 20, she learns of her nephew Julian Bell’s death: he was struck by a shell fragment while driving an ambulance during the Civil War in Spain. In August, she writes, “[Julian] stalks beside me, in many different shapes.” In October, they visit the beach at Cuckmere, where yellow light on the waves turns them into “a great curled volume roughened of water.” In December, she exclaims, “Oh this cursed year 1937—it will never let us out of its claws.” In the early part of 1938, she finishes writing Three Guineas; on March 12, Hitler invades Austria and installs an all-Nazi cabinet in Vienna. She writes, “A veil of insanity everywhere,” and notes: “When the tiger, ie Hitler, has digested his dinner he will pounce again.”
A week later, airplanes are droning over the house. At Easter, a “hard blue dry weather with a cold wind”; on May 24, “Hitler […] is chewing his little bristling mustache.”
Above Monk’s House, where they live in East Sussex, the airplanes look like sharks. On July 7, Martin Freud, Sigmund’s son, who has left Austria after the Anschluss, comes for lunch. A month later, she observes tanks assembled on the hill by Rat Farm like black beetles. On August 17, she writes, “Hitler has his million men now under arms. […] That is the complete ruin not only of civilisation, in Europe, but of our last lap.” Her nephew Quentin is conscripted. On September 28, she observes men digging trenches on Turnham Green in Chiswick. As she walks down Pall Mall, a loudspeaker is advising the purchase of gas masks; on September 30, evacuation of children from London begins. Amid this militarization, she remarks, “One ceases to think about it—that’s all. Goes on discussing the new room, new chair, new books. What else can a gnat on a blade of grass do?” And later, she adds, “Just as in violent personal anxiety, the public lapses, into complete indifference. One can feel no more at the moment.”
On October 1, 1938, the sky is violet with inky purple clouds. She remarks that it appears that they are to live on cabbages and apples from now on. “In 5 years time we may be saying we ought to have put him, Hitler, down now. These dictators & their lust for power—they can’t stop.” On Sunday, a decree that all poisonous snakes and violent animals in the London Zoo are to be shot. On December 11, Woolf writes that the fate of the Jews obsesses Leonard’s widowed mother, Marie, who later suffers a heart attack. The year turns. At the end of January, the Woolfs visit Sigmund Freud in Hampstead, and he gives her a narcissus. About Hitler, Freud says that it will be a “generation before the poison will be worked out.” By March, German airplanes are flying over London. In August, the museums shut down. On August 30, Woolf records that “mad voice” on the radio; the next day, September 1, 1939, Hitler invades Poland; five days later, at 8:30 a.m., is the first British air raid warning.
The Woolfs go to Charleston to see Virginia’s sister Vanessa. Woolf writes, “[I]t’s an empty meaningless world now. Am I a coward? Physically I expect I am. Going to London tomorrow I expect frightens me.” In October: “Nightly we’re served out with a few facts, or a childstory of the adventures of a submarine.” In November, they listen on the radio to “the strangled hysterical sobbing swearing ranting of Hitler at the Beer Hall.” After he leaves, a bomb detonates, immediately killing seven people. In January 1940, “there’s a rush, like a mattress falling, as the snow slides off the roof.” In February, the cold is bitter; at dinner with T. S. Eliot, his face a “great yellow bronze mask,” Woolf hears the poet say that “barbarian[s] will gradually freeze out culture.” Woolf’s brother-in-law, Clive Bell, adds that he himself sees the light going out gradually. She “throws some rash theories into the air.” On March 29, house guests at Monk’s House have eaten all the butter. Woolf is rereading Sense and Sensibility.
On April 9, the Germans invade Norway. It’s a fine spring day. She writes: “Some say this is Hitler’s downfall. I must make this record, for in fact it gives the old odd stretch to the back curtain of the mind.” Airplanes fly overhead. Meat is bad and scarce. A month later, she reports, “Jews beaten up.” Leonard and Virginia Woolf discuss suicide as an option if Hitler invades England. They have decided death by carbon monoxide poisoning. She notes, “Better shut the garage doors,” and comments, “This a sensible, rather matter of fact talk,” then asks herself, “But what is the point in waiting?” On May 25, BBC Radio announces that Amiens and Arras have fallen to the Germans. On June 9, she writes, “I will continue—but can I? […] A gritting day. As sample of my present mood, I reflect: capitulation will mean all Jews to be given up. Concentration camps. So to our garage.” They paper over their bedroom windows.
On June 6, Woolf learns that a man from the village, a gardener, was found dead from shock on the beach at Dunkirk. On the way to meet her brother Adrian, she checks her pocket for her packet of morphia. The war, she writes, “has taken away the outer wall of security. No echo comes back.” A plane crashes at Southease; the Germans haunt her afternoon walks. On July 5, she records her “idiotic anguish” about being badly dressed at a dinner party, and resolves to visit her dressmaker. A few mornings later, she records the skies over Asheham, “like the green backgrounds in Vermeer & then the little rusty grey church, & the cows, sun beaded, fringed with sun.” In the evening, she can see the trails of the German planes, like feelers of light, the drone like a dentist’s drill. On July 26, listening to the nightly BBC broadcast, she thinks, “And—I had something else to say—but what? And dinner to get ready.”
In August, Woolf hides from an air raid in a haystack. Leonard tells her not to close her teeth. The air hums and saws. “Is it thunder? I said. No, guns, said L.” At the end of the month, they see planes very high up, marked with the German Black Cross. She writes, “It wd [sic] have been a peaceful matter of fact death to be popped off on the terrace playing bowls this very fine cool sunny August evening.” The following day, Vita Sackville-West phones to say that she can’t come to lunch because bombs are falling around her house, Long Barn. In September, the evening is so lovely over the flats and the downs that it is as if she is seeing them for the last time.
On a visit to London, to their home in Mecklenburgh Square, the couple finds the house next door blown to bits. A mirror hangs from its hinges “like a tooth knocked out.” A week later, a time bomb in the square detonates and makes their house uninhabitable. Woolf notes in the diary that she thinks about violent death; Leonard plays chess with a young British soldier who turns up in the garden. On September 18, she records that the words that come to her mind this morning are “We have need of all our courage.” In October, she publishes “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” in an American magazine, The New Republic:
The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound—far more than prayers and anthems—that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we—not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born—will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead.
Woolf reads Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France and writes that “one must drop a safety curtain over ones private scene. Michelet is my safety curtain.” There is no mail delivery. A week later, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s studios are destroyed, and on the 29th, a bomb drops so close to Monk’s House that Woolf curses Leonard for slamming a window. She remarks: “[N]ow we’re marooned, I ought to cram in a little more reading.”
Jules Michelet was among the first writers to consider how history is shaped not only by tyrants and kings but also by the thoughts and actions of ordinary men and women. Reading Woolf’s diaries in these past months was my safety curtain, as Michelet was for Woolf—one foot in New York, the other in Bloomsbury. A way to be elsewhere, following routes someone else’s mind has laid down. But as in her reading of Michelet, fear seeped through the curtain weave for me. As the pages diminished, I read more and more slowly. I wanted to hold on; I knew what would happen, in Britain—in 1941, the Blitz killed over 40,000 people—and to Woolf, and I did not want to let her go. How do we read, and reread, knowing what will happen? History is a kind of rereading, and there is no way to make it stop. Oh no, not again! I’ve found myself thinking at a performance of King Lear or The Seagull. When one of my daughters was about 15, reading Anna Karenina for the first time, I watched her progress with trepidation. One afternoon, I heard a shriek from the kitchen and knew she had come to the end of the book.
We close the book, the performance ends, but history keeps on. Between the Acts, Woolf’s last novel, also ends at the “present time,” in this case, 1939. “Reality too strong,” says Miss La Trobe, the author of a village play, interrupted by warplanes overhead. The questions that Woolf asks are ours: How do we at once resist tyranny and shop for haddock for supper? Should we have the momentary privilege to do both? Three days after the bomb drops close to Monk’s House, she tries to imagine what it would be like to be killed by a bomb: “I shall think—oh I wanted another 10 years—not this and shan’t, for once, be able to describe it.” Above the house, the glittering stars are scattered trinkets. Is it treason, she wonders, to say that the weather is fine as she gazes at the fields and ponders what to make for supper?
The whistle of bombs overhead is heard for the first time, which she describes as the squeal of “a toy pig escaping.” Bicycling through Lewes, she sees a brown velvet dress in a shop window but resists stopping; in early November, she notes the beauty of a haystack in a flooded field. In December, their surviving possessions arrive from London. Hitler has, she remarks, “obliterated all our books tables carpets & pictures.” They eat pickled eggs. Now that the butter has been gobbled up, Woolf attempts to churn butter from skimmed milk (not a success). In January, the marsh is the colour of an opaque emerald. “Yes,” she writes, “I was thinking: we live without a future.”
Virginia Woolf writes in her diary until March 24, 1941, four days before her death. On March 8, after attending Leonard’s speech in Brighton on the subject of “common sense in history,” she spies a pretty hat and notes, “I will go down with my colours flying,” then writes: “Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.”
By March 18, 1941, Leonard is concerned that Woolf is unwell. Vanessa Bell, who has come to tea, shares his misgivings. Woolf is taken to Brighton to see her doctor, who advises quiet and rest. On April 2, Leonard is quoted in a cable printed in The New York Times: “Mrs. Woolf is presumed to be dead. She went for a walk last Friday, leaving a letter behind, and it is thought she has been drowned. Her body, however, has not been recovered.”
Her body washed up, near Lewes, on April 18. Had it not been for the rise of Hitler, would Virginia Woolf have filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse? It is impossible to say. Six months earlier, she’d written that she wanted “another 10 years.” And three years before that: “These dictators & their lust for power—they can’t stop.” Woolf’s last sentence, written on March 24, 1941: “L. is doing the rhododendron.”
LARB Contributor
Cynthia Zarin’s most recent books are the novels Estate, published November 2025, and Inverno (2024), as well as Next Day: New and Selected Poems (2024). She teaches at Yale.
