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WOOLF, Virginia : A Writer's Diary. Being Extracts From the Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Leonard Woolf. FIRST EDITION - FROM THE LIBRARY OF A. L. ROWSE WITH HIS WONDERFUL ANNOTATIONS AND NOTES

1953

The Hogarth Press. London. 1953. DW. First edition.A unique copy from the library of A. L. Rowse, the British author, historian and Shakespeare scholar, with his ownership signature to front pastedown (under flap of wrapper) with the later addition in his own hand, "re-read Oct '91" [Rowse was 88 at that time]. It is a phenomenal experience to read through his notes which are in both pencil and biro. He appears to be marking the diary as if it was a piece of work by a rather annoying pupil. Occasionally VW gets a couple of ticks and the word "sense" written by a paragraph but mostly he is rude, scathing and even occasionally uses phrases like, "silly bitch". He points out she is jealous, (of Katherine Mansfield and others), snobbish, supercilious, cold and unfeeling, especially over peace day 1919 - "All the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, the millions of lads dead, amoung them Pegay [?], or her young friend Rupert Brooke, or a Wilfred Owen. Good God, the supercilious coldness, the lack of any red blood, any sense of humanity - in a novelist." There are also lots of other asides about leftish intellectuals, feminism and more interesting insights of the period, for example.. "Simply because Maugham had flattered yg Isherwood." The rear endpaper has 20 lines of extra notes with page references.The book is a clean and sound copy in a Vanessa Bell wrapper with a sunned spine. From Wikipedia "One of Rowse's great enthusiasms was collecting books, and he owned many first editions, many of them bearing his acerbic annotations."

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