Stories within stories

The writing and reading of diaries and women's legacy

Resumen

The aim of this article is to discuss Virginia Woolf’s “The legacy” making an articulation between the relevance of the diaries and a critique against the violence of patriarchal society, of which women and men can be victims. The presence of the diaries endows the narrative with a metafictional structure, of a story within a story, so as to create suspense and produce irony. Because of the diaries, the characters change positions and occupy different places throughout the narrative. At last, we argue that the diaries constitute a powerful metonymy for women’s writing and for the emotional elaboration of their life experiences.