Truth Tellers: Virginia Woolf, ‘I always tell the truth’
This was Woolf’s life question, her life quest, the catalyst of her genius. She struggled with it, like Jacob struggled with the angel, and she would not let go until the true and the beautiful, in one way or another, blessed her. “When I write, I always, always tell the truth,” she admonished a friend who suggested that she might do otherwise. In her letters, diaries, and fiction, the struggle never ends. Young Virginia Stephen and her older sister Vanessa. (Public Domain)
Her Diaries
Her diaries, comprising 6,873 pages in a Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition, tell us her most intimate thoughts and feelings. These pages were not meant for our eyes, and she asked her husband to burn them after her death. They perhaps contain the farthest reaches of her mind, and some of her most beautiful phrases, as well as her candid, private views of contemporaries.