The second volume of Virginia Woolf's diaries covers the important years during which "Jacob's Room" and "Mrs. Dalloway" were written. At the center are the exciting, challenging, and sometimes frightening aspects of her own development as a writer. The ever-expanding circle of friends within London society, the sometimes exhausting domestic life in Richmond, and the intensity of her reaction to visual beauty – all of this is expressed with sparkling directness and natural eloquence. Virginia Woolf records her thoughts on Katherine Mansfield and T. S. Eliot, describes the beginnings of her passionate friendship with Vita Sackville-West, and starts to develop her ideas for a new form of the novel.