Ambivalence

Abstract

In October of 1924, in the same diary entry in which Virginia Woolf termed her journals a “practice” ground for her fiction, she also considered the “ghosts” that “slip between me & the page” (DVW 2:317). Among these was Katherine Mansfield, “that strange ghost […] dragging herself across her room” (DVW 2:317). Here, Woolf contemplates Mansfield’s “gifts” but ultimately dismisses them as inferior to her own, noting that “if she’d lived, she’d have written on, & people would have seen that I was the more gifted—that wd. only have become more & more apparent” (DVW 2:317). Later in the same entry, Woolf also reflects on another literary “ghost” in her life: Thomas Hardy.