Diaries: a fresh perspective on history<\/h3>\n
Indeed, diary entries written on the same day as major events can put what we\u2019ve traditionally thought of as being \u2018history\u2019 into perspective. As Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman living in Amsterdam, wrote in February 1942: \u201cIt is now half-past seven in the morning. I have clipped my toenails, drunk a mug of genuine Van Houtens cocoa, and had some bread and honey.\u201d She described feeling, at that moment, \u201cenormous faith and gratitude that life should be so beautiful\u201d, despite the fact that she had to report to the Gestapo that same day, and would die in Auschwitz<\/a> the following year.<\/p>\n It risks stereotype to suggest female diarists are more attuned to the immediacy of daily life than their male counterparts. The pragmatism of Nella Last\u2019s pears \u2013 the ridiculous, rather than the sublime \u2013 has many an echo in the diary of Samuel Pepys<\/a>.<\/p>\n Perhaps it is risky even to suggest that women are more willing to be frank about their failure to see the wider perspective. \u201cOh, what a wretch I am! If I haven\u2019t forgotten to put in the grand news!! SEBASTOPOL HAS FALLEN!\u201d wrote the educational reformer Lucy Cavendish upon hearing of the Allies\u2019 victory during the Crimean War<\/a> in 1855. More than 60 years later, in 1918, the novelist Virginia Woolf<\/a> noted wryly that there were three facts on her mind: talk of peace, a visit to London\u2019s 1917 Club and the breaking of her spectacles, though the first was, after all, \u201cthe most important of the three\u201d.<\/p>\n A few women\u2019s diaries have been widely studied: Nella Last\u2019s journals were adapted into the 2006 ITV drama Housewife, 49<\/em>; Etty Hillesum\u2019s contemporary, Anne Frank<\/a>, is a household name; and Virginia Woolf is one of many professional writers noted as much for her life-writing as for her other forms of literature.<\/p>\n But overall, we are still playing catch-up, and women\u2019s diaries are still largely ignored in comparison to those of their male counterparts. Indeed, women make up less than a third of the contributors to one of the most popular anthologies of diaries, and less than a fifth in another readily available volume \u2013 all this despite the fact the private, unassuming nature of the form has traditionally been viewed as being particularly suited to women.<\/p>\n This past lack of study is now being corrected to a significant degree, but much of the astonishing material in female diaries remains overlooked. When we begin exploring such sources, however, we find that our view of women in the past becomes both more vivid and more nuanced.<\/p>\n Women\u2019s diaries offer extraordinary stories, reflecting many different walks of life. Ada Blackjack<\/a>, an Indigenous Alaskan woman recruited to take part in a 1921 expedition to Wrangel Island, off Siberia, describes her experiences as its sole survivor. Regency governess Ellen Weeton laments being thrown onto the street by her husband and denied access to their daughter. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of aviator Charles Lindbergh<\/a>, records her agony following the kidnap and murder of her baby son<\/a>.<\/p>\n Other diaries are given extraordinary poignancy by the hindsight of history \u2013 particularly those written during times of conflict. The First World War diarist Vera Brittain, for example, describes feeling elated as she prepares to meet her fianc\u00e9 coming home from the front in 1915, only to be stopped by a telegram announcing his death.<\/p>\n A few women have seen their diaries entering the public domain by virtue of their political position. Lady Bird Johnson, wife of Lyndon B Johnson, writes of seeing John F Kennedy<\/a>\u2019s presidential cavalcade driving into Dallas on 22 November 1963, and how she first thought that the sounds of gunshots were firecrackers being let off by the crowd. A few years later, she introduced a published version of her diaries by stating that \u2013 after unexpectedly becoming America\u2019s first lady \u2013 she stood in a unique position and wanted to \u201cpreserve [history] as it happened\u201d.<\/p>\n Although Lady Bird\u2019s notability came while serving in a conventional female role \u2013 that of a wife \u2013 some diarists have achieved political prominence in their own right. The Labour MPs Barbara Castle and Oona King, for instance, both had their diaries published shortly after leaving frontline politics.<\/p>\n Others again have found their potential developing within the traditional female role of a nurturer or caregiver. In fact, there could be a whole book containing nurses\u2019 diary entries alone, such as those of Cynthia Asquith, who discovered that she could achieve so much more as a First World War nursing volunteer than as a socialite.<\/p>\n Long before the diary format was familiar in the western world, Heian period Japan (AD 794\u20131185) saw an explosion of what was in many ways a form of diary writing. One of its most notable exponents was poet and court attendant Sei Sh\u014dnagon (c966\u20131017\/1025), who commented on the manners and mores of the era, as well as the natural world around her.<\/p>\n \u201cOn the third day of the Third Month I like to see the sun shining bright and calm in the spring sky,\u201d she writes in one entry. \u201cNow is the time when the peach trees come into bloom, and what a sight it is!\u201d<\/p>\n An Elizabethan gentlewoman reared in the strict Protestant tradition, Lady Margaret Hoby (1571\u20131633) is the first woman known to have written a diary in English. Unlike her better-known contemporary Lady Anne Clifford \u2013 whose diary reflects her emotional life in a way that is more recognisable today \u2013 Margaret Hoby\u2019s journal instead concentrates on her spiritual observance.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, it gives us an invaluable insight into her daily routine, as well as her relationship with her husband: \u201cAfter private prayers I kept all this day [30 December 1600] with Mr Hoby, who was very far out of temper with a looseness, fearing ague.\u201d<\/p>\n A teacher living in Massachusetts before the American Civil War, the diaries of Charlotte Forten (1837\u20131914) actively explore the everyday difficulties she experienced as a black woman. On 17 January 1857, for instance, she describes going for dinner with two friends and talking about the \u201cwrongs and suffering of [their] race\u201d.<\/p>\n She then pledges to do \u201call the very little that lies in my power, while life and strength last!\u201c Forten kept true to her word: during and after the war, she helped to educate freed slaves from the South, and became heavily involved in organisations such as the National Association of Colored Women.<\/p>\n Victorian maid-of-all-work Hannah Cullwick (1833\u20131909) kept a diary at the urging of the man she called \u2018Massa\u2019 \u2013 London civil servant and philanthropist Arthur Munby. Details of the pair\u2019s bizarre sexual relationship, which saw Cullwick donning all manner of costumes and guises, runs side by side with a rare account of \u2018downstairs\u2019 life.<\/p>\n \u201cI made my mind up that it was best & safest to be a slave to a gentleman, nor wife & equal to any vulgar man,\u201d she writes in an entry from 1873. \u201cI can work at ease. I can go out & come in when I please, & I can look as degraded as ever I like\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n In 1966, Lancashire housewife Nella Last (1889\u20131968) submitted her final diary entry to the Mass Observation social research project. The journal, which spans 27 years and runs to some 12 million words, is notable for offering an insight into the life of an \u2018ordinary\u2019 British woman, as well as the author\u2019s emancipation during the Second World War, when she worked for the Women\u2019s Voluntary Service (WVS).<\/p>\n \u201cI reflected tonight on the changes the war had brought,\u201d Last writes on 14 March 1940. \u201c[My husband] told me rather wistfully I was \u2018not so sweet\u2019 since I\u2019d been down at the [WVS] Centre, and I said: \u2018Well! Who wants a woman of fifty to be sweet, anyway? And besides, I suit me a lot better!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Historical diaries can be surprising for all sorts of reasons, but sometimes their surprise lies in their sense of familiarity today. At the dawn of the 19th century, the Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry<\/a> wrote about the difficulties of trying to balance her work with her family life, as well as her struggles to bond with her newborn baby.<\/p>\n On other occasions, their surprise \u2013 or perhaps their shock \u2013 instead lies in the merciful unfamiliarity of experiences that must have loomed in the minds of many. I once remember reading novelist Fanny Burney\u2019s 1811 account of undergoing a mastectomy without anaesthetic, and wondering whether I could get out of the library without throwing up on the floor.<\/p>\n The privacy of diaries has enabled women to speak with a frankness we do not find in other sources \u2013 about, for example, their own physicality. In one entry, Virginia Woolf mentions having been unable to write for what she describes as the \u201cusual reasons\u201d, but which had since \u201cduly delivered themselves\u201d \u2013 a reference, one presumes, to her menstrual cycle. Similarly, the 18th-century diarist Hester Thrale Piozzi describes her experiences of going through the menopause, calling it the \u201cSecond Critical change\u201d in her life after the menarche: \u201cI believe my oldest Friend is at last going to leave me\u2026 nor do I, nor did I then feel any other very material Alteration from the coming or going of Youth.\u201d<\/p>\n A 14-year-old Anne Frank writes about her body with even more openness: \u201cEach time I have a period \u2013 and that has only been three times \u2013 I have a feeling that in spite of all the pain, unpleasantness, and nastiness, I have a sweet secret, and that is why, although it is nothing but a nuisance to me in a way, I always long for the time that I shall feel that secret within me again.\u201d<\/p>\n Such accounts serve to remind us that although the records of women from the past regularly dwell on their physicality \u2013 from the assaults of witch-hunters to discussions of a queen\u2019s beauty or fertility \u2013 women\u2019s views about their own bodies have often been written out of history.<\/p>\n Women have used diaries for other forms of release, too. Sometimes they have been a place to express feelings \u2013 anger, resentment, frustrated ambition \u2013 that would have been considered unacceptable in the author\u2019s day. Both the landowner Anne Lister (recently the subject of the BBC drama Gentleman Jack<\/em><\/a>) and author Beatrix Potter<\/a> wrote their diaries in code. But while Lister\u2019s lesbianism was an obvious reason for secrecy, Potter\u2019s youthful despair \u2013 before the success of her books gave her a measure of independence \u2013 was likewise a transgression in its own way.<\/p>\n A disproportionate number of women\u2019s diaries have been written at a time of distress: the scientist Marie Curie<\/a> is just one woman who briefly found relief in her journal after the death of her husband, Pierre. Meanwhile, the shock that author Mary Shelley<\/a> experienced following the death of her premature daughter is evident, given the brevity of the entries: \u201cFind my baby dead\u2026 a miserable day \u2013 in the evening read Fall of the Jesuits.\u201d<\/p>\n A number of youthful diaries end on marriage, or motherhood. \u201cWith this day my journal ends, for I have now a living one to keep faithfully, more faithfully than this,\u201d wrote Fanny Longfellow, wife of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, following the birth of the couple\u2019s first child in 1844. In this case, however, the lure of the diary proved too strong, and Fanny later began a new series of journals on the progress of her children.<\/p>\n There are obvious reasons why the diaries of women such as Fanny Longfellow should have been preserved for future generations. Indeed, looking back through the archives, the wives and female relatives of famous men feature in the known chronicles of female diarists with disproportionate frequency. Dorothy Wordsworth\u2019s description of dancing daffodils, after all, made it into her brother William\u2019s most famous poetry.<\/p>\n One question that is begged by Fanny Burney\u2019s vivid account of her mastectomy is: what actually counts as a diary? It was written as a journal letter, covering several months, and sent to her sister Esther. It nonetheless had the stamp of immediacy \u2013 like the diaries of, say American pioneer women travelling west, though these were often written for the benefit of the relatives they had left behind. But there is surely a distinction between the diary or journal and the memoir, written perhaps years later with a view to posterity.<\/p>\n It would be naive to assume that the apparently private form of the diary was not sometimes written with one eye on its future publication. Virginia Woolf speculated what kind of a book her husband Leonard would make of hers after her death, while the French essayist Ana\u00efs Nin regarded her diaries as her life\u2019s work and made sure she was photographed storing them in a bank vault for safekeeping. It would be similarly naive to ignore the huge role the editor of a published diary may have played, such as Princess Beatrice censoring the diaries of her mother Queen Victoria<\/a> and destroying the originals.<\/p>\n Historically, the ability for a woman to both keep and preserve a diary was restricted to the professional and upper classes. This in turn has impacted the racial diversity of diaries available to us, though considerable work is being done to address that today. Indeed, the last few decades have not only seen the writings of noted anti-slavery activist Charlotte Forten becoming more widely accessible, but the diaries of other key figures \u2013 such as free black woman Emilie Davis and former slave Harriet Jacobs<\/a> \u2013 made available in bookshops as well.<\/p>\n But if the profile of prominent diarists is changing, so too is the nature of the diary itself. Taking photos on mobile phones and even writing social media posts \u2013 though primarily a public medium, rather than a private one \u2013 can be considered akin to keeping a diary. One way or another, the creation of women\u2019s diaries is an ongoing story, as will our study of them be too.<\/p>\n![\"Etty](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2024\/04\/BAL2528116-5f1dbab.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"Etty")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>An overlooked resource<\/h3>\n
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Women from different walks of life<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"Ada](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2024\/04\/EU006377-2-799ee61.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"Ada")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>5 female diarists and their views on hidden aspects of history<\/h4>\n
Sei Sh\u014dnagon, Japanese poet<\/strong><\/h6>\n
Lady Margaret Hoby, Protestant writer<\/strong><\/h6>\n
Charlotte Forten, anti-slavery activist<\/strong><\/h6>\n
Hannah Cullwick, maid who defied convention<\/strong><\/h6>\n
Nella Last, observer of the Home Front<\/strong><\/h6>\n
Being frank about physicality<\/strong><\/h3>\n
I once remember reading novelist Fanny Burney\u2019s 1811 account of undergoing a mastectomy without anaesthetic, and wondering whether I could get out of the library without throwing up on the floor <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
A place for feelings and secrets<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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An eye on posterity<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"Nella](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2024\/04\/NellaLast-a9b4f65.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"Nella")
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