On 1st January 1915 Virginia Woolf set herself to write a day-by-day diary; interrupted after a few weeks by illness, she began again in 1917, and from then until a few days before her death in 1941 she habitually used the diary to record her activities, observations and preoccupations. The result is one of the greatest diaries in the English language, now available for the first time in paperback in a one-volume abridged edition. 'A work of the highest imaginative genius, with powers of perception and description unexplaned in our time' Isaiah Berlin. Virginia Woolf turned to her diary as to an intimate friend, to whom she could freely and spontaneously confide the thoughts and images uppermost in her mind. Whether describing public events or the joys and trials of domestic life, gossiping about her friends or wrestling with the difficulties of her art, gossiping about her friends or wrestling with the difficulties of her art, Virginia Woolf writes with unfailing grace, courage and honesty, and a lively wit which make her one of the most moving and entertaining diarists of this, or any, century. 'The moment I begin to read that light, clear, elegant prose I am seduced. (Virginia Woolf's)nephew Quentin Bell claims that the 30 volumes of Woolf's diary are a masterpiece. Anne Olivier Bell has reduced them to a single volume. I think it is still a masterpiece. ' A S Byatt, EVENING STANDARD