Further, the war—our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation—has taken away the outer wall of security. . . . We pour to the edgeof a precipice . . . and then? I can’t conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.

Everything has gone from me but the certaintyof your goodness. I cant go on spoiling your life any longer. I dont think two people could havebeen happier than we have been.

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recoverthis time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.

[ Final diary entry :] Occupation is essential. Andnow with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannotshare; to procure benefits which I have notshared and probably will not share; but not togratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country. For . . . in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As awoman my country is the whole world.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slipquotations down people’s throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

When, however, one reads of a witch beingducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of awise woman selling herbs, or even of a veryremarkable man who had a mother, then Ithink we are on the track of a lost novelist, asuppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashedher brains out on the moor or mopped andmowed about the highways crazed with thetorture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, Iwould venture to guess that Anon, who wroteso many poems without signing them, wasoften a woman.

Death is the enemy. . . . Against you I willfling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, ODeath!

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, Ihave had my vision.

I found myself thinking with intense curiosityabout death. Yet if I’m persuaded of anything, it is of mortality—Then why this sense that death is going to be a great excitement?—somethingpositive, active?