A Review by Wagoner of Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries & the Diaries She Read, by Barbara Lounsberry

The scope and influence of literary Modernism continues to expand, and current scholarship includes not only studies of Modernism within its time period in literary history, but increasingly the force Modernism exerts on innovations in contemporary literature. Barbara Lounsberry’s new book, Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries & the Diaries She Read, the second volume in her ongoing study of the diaries of Virginia Woolf, breaks open at the molecular level the complex and thrilling confluence of currents that fed Woolf’s writing, as well as an examination of how she used formal experimentation in her diaries to create innovative new strategies that were deployed in her public writing. This volume will be of interest to scholars in many areas, as it delivers detailed explication of the ways Woolf’s shifting practices as a diarist resulted in some of the most important formal innovations of Modernist literature