The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4 (1931-35)

This volume of Virginia Woolf’s diary has a slower pace: she is finishing The Waves and wrestling with the shape of her next novel (The Years). These years are marred by the death of many of the people in her circle, including her close friend Lytton Strachey. Woolf also reflects on the political situation in Britain, and the menacing rise of fascism abroad. The diary testifies to the sense of external threat, as well as the tension between her social and her writing life, but as she and Leonard embark on a series of foreign trips she also revels in the discovery of new places and the profound contentment of her marriage.