Every so often a book comes along and changes the way you see a classic of literature. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, published between 1977 and 1984, came out decades after Woolf’s death in 1941, and added a stunning lens through which to view her long and dynamic career. Her husband Leonard had carefully edited a volume initially in 1953, one that focused entirely on Woolf’s writing process and avoided personal details, but it was only when Woolf’s diaries were released in their totality that readers gained a precious glimpse inside a complicated mind at work.

VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE WAR WITHOUT, THE WAR WITHIN: HER FINAL DIARIES AND THE DIARIES SHE READ by Barbara Lounsberry University Press of Florida, 408 pp., $84.95

They revealed a Woolf unexpectedly playful and at times mundane: “So now I have assembled my facts,” she wrote on August 22, 1922, “to which I now add my spending 10/6 on photographs, which we developed in my dress cupboard last night; & they are all failures. Compliments, clothes, building, photography—it is for these reasons that I cannot write Mrs Dalloway.” They also reveal a Woolf at times both vicious and shitty: her cattiness, her casual racism. Ruth Gruber, who wrote the first PhD dissertation on Woolf, had a short, pleasant correspondence with her in the 1930s, only to discover, when the diaries were later published, Woolf referring to her dismissively as a “German Jewess” (Gruber was born in Brooklyn). As Gruber would write of the experience, “Diaries can rip the masks from their creators.”

Unlike many writers’ diaries, The Diary of Virginia Woolf has become more than just a gloss on her novels; it is a work of literature in and of itself, a powerful and startling look into the inner life of a woman writer during a dramatic time. “I will not be ‘famous,’ ‘great,’” she wrote in 1933. “I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.” Woolf began writing in a diary in 1897, when she was just 14 years old; she would continue on and off again, for the rest of her life; she would write the final entry four days before her death in March 1941. In total, she wrote over 770,000 words in her diaries alone.

“Woolf’s semiprivate diaries serve as the interface between her unconscious and her public prose,” writes Woolf scholar Barbara Lounsberry, an emeritus English professor at Northern Iowa University. Now, over the course of three books, Lounsberry has provided a key to understanding that diary more fully: what it is, how it was made, and how to read it. In Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read (2014), Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries and the Diaries She Read (2016), and now Virginia Woolf, the War Without, the War Within: Her Final Diaries and the Diaries She Read, Lounsberry offers a comprehensive and thorough reading of The Diary of Virginia Woolf and, in the process, has changed how it should be read.

Lounsberry’s reinterpretation starts with the title itself: There is not a diary of Virginia Woolf, but 38 different journals and diaries. Each volume is its own book, each a discrete project started by Woolf with a different purpose and at a different moment in her writing career. This difference is essential. Read as a single, long work, Woolf’s diary might resemble Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: something grand, monolithic, and almost over-bearing, the creation of a holistic and unified author of canonical masterworks. But Woolf, like all of us, was not a single person so much as a cascade of different voices, emotions, personas—all of which complemented and conflicted with one another. By treating her diaries as she composed them—discrete but overlapping, experimental and at times provisional—we come much closer to understanding the person who wrote them.