Secret Voices (eBook)

Foreword

This was never going to be an exhaustive record of women’s diaries. With so many individuals writing, under such different circumstances, a definitive record would be an impossibility. It is a personal take – but reflective, I trust, of the available evidence. Some women were writing in the deepest possible privacy; others had a reader in mind. But if I were to pick out the single strongest emotions voiced through all these diary entries I think it would be anger – frustration. And that is something that our cultural norms have allowed women to voice only secretly.

The diary has been the echo chamber for a woman’s own voice, as opposed to what she was supposed to say. And, down the centuries, the need to utilize records in support of a male-oriented history has often kept those voices silent – until now. But thanks to new work, to a new foregrounding of women’s history (and, in no small part to the internet’s role in making such work internationally available), they can be heard with increasing clarity.

A number of these diarists did contemplate the possibility of their diary being read. Many pioneers and emigrants, indeed, kept daily journals to be sent to relatives back home. I have limited the use of these journal-letters, though not excluded them entirely. More invidiously, perhaps, Dorothy Wordsworth read her famous diaries to her brother (who made use of her observations in his poetry), and Virginia Woolf speculated as to what kind of a book her husband might eventually make of hers. Oscar Wilde had a wry word for it: ‘it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions,’ says Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest, ‘and consequently meant for publication.’

Two of the most famous female diarists, Anne Frank and Fanny Burney, addressed their diaries respectively to an imaginary ‘Kitty’, and to ‘a Certain Miss Nobody’. What that implies, of course, is that they could not find a live auditor to whom they could speak freely. A diary, wrote P. D. James, noting the prevalence of the ‘Dear Diary’ address, can be ‘a defence against loneliness ... both friend and confidant, one from whom neither criticism nor treachery need be feared.’ It can also be the repository of ‘thoughts that cannot be spoken aloud’. Or, as Fanny Burney put it, ‘To Nobody, then, will I write my journal, since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved, to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my heart ...’ Still that sense of secrecy.

Of course, there is another agenda implicit here: the assumption that women’s experience differs from that of men; that their diaries reflect that difference; that they need to be chronicled separately. It risks cliché to suggest that the female diary is more inclined to introspection – or even that the women found the diary form, with its privacy and informality, its unassuming quality, less daunting than the open self-proclamation of the male-dominated autobiography.

But historically women’s experience has been different to that of men. (The husband of pioneer Amelia Stewart Knight likewise faced the hardships of the Oregon Trail – though he was not eight months pregnant while doing so.) Yet anthologies not devoted specifically to women still include an alarmingly low percentage of female diarists.

Many years ago, I wrote a book about the subjects women cover in their diaries. In this country at least, women’s writing was then to some degree still regarded as a second-class subject of study; but the point is that your own country was pretty much all you could study, since the barely nascent internet had not yet made texts from around the world available. (I managed, then, to include a few American texts not published here – but only because my mother happened to be visiting the USA, and was prepared to spend much of her trip in the Library of Congress.) The internet has exponentially altered that situation – but with new opportunities come new responsibilities. Something else has changed in those years, likewise for the better. Recent times have seen a growing awareness of the need for any selection of voices from the past to be as inclusive as possible.

Historically, the production (and, crucially, preservation) of diaries has, for obvious reasons, been weighted towards the literate middle and upper classes. That has, in turn, had the effect of prioritizing white women; though the situation is slowly being remedied today. I found a particular challenge in tracking down English-language or translated diaries by women of Asian origin; though I look forward to hearing from those whose work has taken them further along these lines. A disproportionate number of diaries published, moreover, are by professional writers ... or else by the female connections of famous men (Sophia Tolstoy, Frances Lloyd George, Dorothy Wordsworth, Anna Dostoevsky), a fact that tells its own story.

By the same token, the list of published diaries in the shops places a particular weight on the overtly extraordinary; recorded either because the diarist enjoyed an experience they wanted to remember, or suffered one the world must never forget. (Travellers, on the one hand – and on the other victims of the Holocaust.) I have limited the use of such very specific records – yet behind the uniqueness of what is described, there often lies a depth of common sentiment. Few widowhoods are as famous as that of Queen Victoria; few suffer Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s experience of the kidnap and death of her son. But the experience of grief and loss is universal.

The therapeutic qualities of diary-writing – ‘journalling’ – are now well known. The way women turn to their diary in times of distress may, however, present an unbalanced picture – besides offering a gloomy prospect for the diary reader! As Barbara Pym put it: ‘I seem to write in it only when I am depressed, like praying only when one is really in despair.’ But historically women have often had good cause to feel dissatisfaction, and the secrecy of the diary form allowed them to voice it. It may, indeed, have been the diary’s prime purpose. Beatrix Potter and Florence Nightingale are only two of the women whose diary-writing ceased or changed once they had at last found their path in life; others end their diary-keeping on marriage and maternity. Oprah Winfrey in her forties took the conscious decision to stop using her journals as therapy – venting her worries about men and weight – and instead started using them to, as she puts it, ‘express my gratitude’. Happily, the gratitude diary has its own long history, from the early Quaker and Dissenter diaries.

The frequency of diary-keeping greatly increased in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the new interest in the private, as opposed to the public, identity. That gives us a lot of time to look back on – a lot of instances when we now know, unlike the diarist themselves, how their story turned out. It is impossible to read Anne Frank’s plans for life after the war without the painful awareness of what actually awaited her. It is also impossible not to feel a slight smug glow when reading George Eliot’s conviction that the novel on which she was working, Middlemarch, would never amount to anything ... Sometimes experience noted in a diary would emerge later in a better-known form. Reading Louisa May Alcott’s description of her sister’s decline and death, one can’t but think of Beth in Little Women, who likewise found the sewing needle grow ‘too heavy’. Often an element of outside knowledge can illumine the diary itself; hence the brief biographies of principal diarists given at the back of this book.

I would urge readers to consult those biographies for another reason, also: Secret Voices aims to reflect the totality of experience described in women’s diaries; and some of that, inevitably, travels to a dark place: suicide (Rachel Roberts); abortion (Loran Hurnscot). A look at the life stories of the diarists might provide a warning flag for those readers with particular vulnerabilities. Another word of warning: the diaries quoted here reflect the time in which they were written. As such they are bound occasionally to deploy terms no longer in use, or to display attitudes no longer considered acceptable.

The format of this book, arranged by the days of the calendar year, presents both opportunities and challenges. It excludes many famous diarists who choose not to list their entries under a particular day; as well, of course, as diarists from any part of the world not using the Western calendar. (As it is, Sophia Tolstoy and Anna Dostoevsky listed their entries according to the Julian rather than the Gregorian calendar, which Russia did not adopt until 1917.) In Britain, Jan Morris listed the entries in her ‘thought diary’ only as ‘Day 25, Day 26’. The Australian diarist Helen Garner, known to have written every morning and every night, nonetheless chose to have her diaries published without dates: I therefore include only such entries as she has allowed to be dated by reference to external events.

Arranging entries as if through one calendar year can risk confusion. Queen Victoria mourns the death of Prince Albert in January (1862); but marries him only in February (1840). In that particular case, I hope the basic facts of her life are sufficiently well-known; but with less famous writers, I have often tried to select their diary...