“Many scenes have come and gone unwritten, since it is today 4th September, a cold grey blowy day, made memorable by the sight of a kingfisher, and by my sense, waking early, of being again visited by ‘the spirit of delight’.”
— Virginia Woolf in her diary, 4 September 1927
26” H x 10” W x 13½” D
66 cm x 25 cm x 34 cm
book, metal
(2006)
Sunday 4 September 1927
Many scenes have come and gone unwritten, since it is today 4th September, a cold grey blowy day, made memorable by the sight of a kingfisher, and by my sense, waking early, of being again visited by ‘the spirit of delight’. ‘Rarely rarely comest thou, spirit of delight’. That was I singing this time last year; and sang so poignantly that I have never forgotten it, or my vision of a fin rising on a wide blank sea. No biographer could possibly guess this important fact about my life in the late summer of 1926.
Saturday 7 February 1931
How physical the sense of triumph and relief is! Whether good or bad, its done; I mean that I have netted that fin in the waste of waters which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell when I was coming to an end of To the Lighthouse.
— Virginia Woolf, in her diary