An Entry of One’s Own

On February 4, 1602, a Yorkshire gentlewoman named Lady Margaret Hoby wrote in her diary:

I was sent for to Trutsdall to the travail of my Cousin Ison’s wife, who that Morning was brought to bed of a daughter: the same day, at night, I heard of a fish that was taken up at Yarmouth, 53 foot long and 23 broad.

A baby yanked from its mother, a whale pulled from the sea: this act of recording one’s daily doings, and noticing their unlikely rhythms and rhymes, has long skewed female. Typically small, a diary could be slipped into a pocket and retrieved whenever a sliver of time appeared in a schedule crammed with obligations to others—husband, neighbors, tenants, the family shop. Whether written in installments during daylight hours or in a single session before bed, the diary was the unobtrusive companion of someone who could not count on time to herself.

In Secret Voices, a judicious anthology of entries culled from over a hundred women’s diaries, the British biographer Sarah Gristwood has assembled an extraordinary range of voices, starting with Hoby, whose journal is the earliest known by an Englishwoman, and moving into the twenty-first century with Ma Yan, a young woman from Ningxia in rural China who longs to be at school rather than working on the land. We encounter well-known novelists, career girls, disillusioned wives, ecstatic lovers, and working-class women. The setting shifts from drawing room to pioneer wagon and from Melbourne to Alaska. Teenagers desperate to go to parties rub shoulders with those who can’t wait to leave; some women long for children while others are doing their best to get rid of theirs by contriving abortions of dubious safety. A handful of the diarists lead nations; others just want to go shopping.

Diary-keeping in the Anglophone world emerged from the early Puritan practice of drawing up a daily ledger of spiritual gains and lapses. Two hundred years after Hoby, the seventeen-year-old Quaker Elizabeth Fry compiled a lacerating list of her failings: “I am a bubble, without reason, without beauty of mind or person; I am a fool. I daily fall lower in my own estimation.” In a sense, this savage self-talk worked. Fry grew up to be a veritable engine of endeavor, a revered social philanthropist and prison reformer.

From such monitory origins the diary expanded to become a general confessional. In 1944 Anne Frank confides to hers that she has gone “too quickly” in kissing Peter, the seventeen-year-old boy sharing her family’s hiding place on Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht. Eleanor Coppola, writing in 1977 and more than a decade into her marriage with the filmmaker, divulges that she has “been waiting for Francis to leave me, or die, so that I can get my life the way I want it.” (In fact they remained married until her death earlier this year.) Oprah Winfrey, meanwhile, frets endlessly about her weight.

In her brief introduction Gristwood explains that she chose the title “Secret Voices” to honor the diary’s function as a repository for all the rage, lust, and self-loathing that women have historically felt unable to share with the world. Yet it soon becomes clear that many of these diarists imagined—hoped—that their voices would be heard or read by many. Oscar Wilde slyly called out this doublethink when he had Cecily Cardew in The Importance of Being Earnest describe her diary as “simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication.” Certainly the fifteen-year-old Fanny Burney, the future prolific novelist, is fooling no one (and perhaps not even herself) when she declares in 1768: “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.” A hundred and fifty years later Anne Frank invents a friend named Kitty to whom she vows to tell everything.

Older diarists tended to be clearer about their tangled motivations. In 1811 the thirty-six-year-old Lady Charlotte Bury pondered:

If nobody is ever to read what one writes, there is no satisfaction in writing; and, if any body does see it, mischief ensues. So I will not write a journal, but brief notes of such things as I conceive may be amusing, without incurring danger to myself or others.

This sounds sensible, if a bit dull. So it is a delight to find on reading further that Bury’s diary is full of scurrilous and potentially offensive material. From her pole position as a lady-in-waiting to Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged consort of the prince regent, Bury was quick to spot that Her Royal Highness favored short skirts to show off her pretty ankles and that her decision to stop wearing stays produced whispers of an adulterous pregnancy. Only in 1832, with Caroline safely dead, did Bury accept a rumored thousand pounds—a staggering amount—for the anonymous publication of her diary. Naturally, it caused a sensation.

Almost a century later Lady Cynthia Asquith, the daughter-in-law of Britain’s prime minister, was similarly contemplating her terms of engagement, concerned that she could “never write as though I were really convinced no other eye would ever see what I wrote. I am incurably self-conscious.” She was finally persuaded to try by “an absurd compact I made with Duff Cooper that we would both begin a diary at the same moment, and bind each other over to keep it up.” Uncertain as to how she could ever match Cooper, whose frictionless glide between the worlds of high politics and belles lettres furnished him with top-drawer gossip, Asquith turned to earlier women’s journals for inspiration.

Here she found only more reasons to feel inadequate. “I am reading the diary of Marie Bashkirtseff for the first time,” she records in 1916. “It makes this one seem sadly insipid and impersonal.” She need not have worried about measuring herself against the Russian’s self-referential style, which Bashkirtseff herself later described as spoiled by “excesses of language and silly eccentricities.” When Asquith’s journal was eventually published in 1968, nearly a decade after her death, it became an instant classic, valued for its sober portrait of a generation dealing with the wholesale loss of sons, brothers, and husbands during World War I.

For other diarists, the jeopardy lay less in exposure to the world than to themselves. In 1831 the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Barrett (not yet Browning, and still living in her father’s strict Protestant household) fretted:

How could I write a diary without throwing on paper my thoughts, all my thoughts—the thoughts of my heart as well as of my head?—and then how could I bear to look on them after they were written? Adam made fig leaves necessary for the mind, as well as for the body.

A hundred years later Barbara Pym, a nineteen-year-old Oxford undergraduate and devout Anglican, found a way to fashion her own fig leaf. On October 15, 1932, she records: “Today I must always remember I suppose. I went to tea with Rupert [Gleadow]…—and he with all his charm, eloquence and masculine wiles persuaded….” And here Pym tore out several pages in an attempt to avoid ever being brought face-to-face with the traumatic circumstances in which she first had sex.

When they wrote these entries, both Barrett and Pym were years away from literary eminence. For writers who had already hit their professional stride, diary-keeping was often integrated into their practice. The Canadian poet and novelist Elizabeth Smart characterized her journal as a “blabber-book,” a dumping ground for the weeds of everyday thought and feeling that blocked her path to the deeper places where her true material lay. Virginia Woolf likewise used her diary as a repository for unedited thoughts and impressions, but she made a point of returning later to truffle for “the diamonds of the dustheap.”

Gristwood acknowledges that her selection of diarists is weighted toward the upper and middle classes. These are the people most likely to have a secure corner of their library or at least a trunk with a strong lock in which to store old family papers, such as a great-aunt’s stray diary or an elderly cousin’s tattered notebook. Another factor in the survival of a particular woman’s journal is whether she happened to be adjacent to a more famous man—Sophia Tolstoy, Anna Dostoevsky, and Dorothy Wordsworth all fall into this camp. In other instances, a diary by a woman from a minority background may have survived because it was caught up in a larger (white, imperial) story. Such was the case of Ada Blackjack, an indigenous Alaskan who was the only survivor of the ill-fated Canadian-American expedition of 1921 to claim Wrangel Island from the Russians.

Despite these limitations and caveats, the sheer range of female experience laid bare by Gristwood’s anthology makes it a joy to read. Here the sacred, profane, monumental, and trivial all arrive together: new hats, old lovers, lost sons, adored daughters, thankless colleagues, too much money, not enough, snatched moments of pleasure, and long featureless years of despair. At some points the snippets read like clots of the unconscious and at others like the perfectly serviceable first draft of a novel.

This wild vitality is amplified by Gristwood’s decision to arrange her 1,200 extracts by day rather than year. So under “9 January” an entry from Mary Boykin Chesnut, the Civil War diarist (1864), is followed by one from the British politician Oona King (2001), who gives way to Nelly Ptashkina, a fifteen-year-old Russian émigré writing from Paris in 1919. Finally, Betsey Wynne Fremantle, a British naval officer’s wife, brings up the rear with her personal log from 1797. While this approach requires the reader to be nimble with linguistic shifts—Chesnut’s stately Southern prose yields to King’s informal London drawl, which is followed by Prashkina’s highly strung staccato—it also allows unexpected correspondences to emerge.

Indeed, such is Gristwood’s clever editing that at times her diarists appear to be calling to each other across the centuries. On November 29 Ellen Weeton’s 1818 pious exhortation, “Oh never, never let me rest, my God, when my heart wanders from Thee,” is followed by Nella Last, another North Country diarist, who in 1939 declares herself baffled by a neighbor who “prays to God to strike Hitler dead. Cannot help thinking if God wanted to do that he would not have waited till Mrs Helm asked him to do so.” Under June 28 we hear from Hannah Cullwick (1871), a kitchen maid who relishes her heavy manual labor and is reluctant to accept her employer’s offer of marriage because “it’s too much like being a woman.” (Reader, she did marry him—eventually.) This is capped by Anne Lister, the cross-dressing Yorkshire landowner, who reports delightedly on the same day in 1818, “The people generally remark, as I pass along, how much I am like a man.” Gristwood doesn’t include editorial matter between her extracts, nor does she use footnotes, a decision that trusts the readers to make the connections for themselves.

On occasion this can lead to some strange sequencing. While Queen Victoria is mourning Prince Albert’s death in January (1862), she doesn’t marry him until February (1840). On January 22 Beatrice Webb is enjoying being an independent New Woman—“Men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever!” (1891)—but by March 27 she wants Sidney, her beloved husband of nearly forty years, to retire so that they can spend more time together (1931). Jumping forward to April 26 yet backward to 1890, we learn that, after meeting Sidney for the first time, Beatrice shuddered at her future husband’s “tiny tadpole body,” “unhealthy skin,” and “Cockney pronunciation.”

Prolepsis features everywhere. On September 11, 1869, George Eliot wails: “I do not feel very confident that I can make anything satisfactory of Middlemarch.” A year earlier, on July 15, Louisa May Alcott, head throbbing from overwork, sends off the manuscript of Little Women, desperately hoping it will sell since her previous work has not. Altogether sadder is an entry from July 21, 1944: Anne Frank is excited to hear that an attempt has been made on Hitler’s life and that, “now things are going well at last,” she will likely be returning to school next October.

While Secret Voices is easy to snack on—perhaps at bedtime, that twilit hour when many of the diarists scribbled down their day’s doings—reading in longer stretches allows deeper themes and crosscurrents to emerge. Take the subject of sex. While working- and middle-class women mostly fret about it, or at least its unwanted consequences of extra babies, stretched budgets, and trashed reputations, the upper classes remain strikingly cavalier. On July 24, 1940, the eighteen-year-old aristocrat Joan Wyndham writes:

When I got up to go home at six he said, “How would you like it if I robbed you of your virginity?”

I thought for a minute.

“I don’t think I should mind very much, but then I hardly know you well enough to say.”

Three hundred years earlier Lady Anne Clifford notes that after supper she and her husband played a frisky game of chase on the common, which concluded when “my Lord came to lie in my chamber.”

Aristocratic candor notwithstanding, Clifford halts her account at the bedroom door, which is not the case with two of the early twentieth century’s most notorious diarists, Anaïs Nin and Alma Mahler. Both women kept such explicit records of their sex lives that one wonders whether the act of writing (and rereading?) was a means of extending the pleasure. Certainly, the tone tends to the performative if not hysterical, as when Alma recounts an incident in 1902 when she was making love to her composer husband Gustav around the time that he wrote the sublime “Adagietto” for her:

Then—just as I felt him penetrate, he lost all strength. He laid his head on my breast, shattered—and almost wept for shame. Distraught as I was, I comforted him.

We drove home, dismayed and dejected. He grew a little more cheerful. Then I broke down, had to weep, weep on his breast. What if he were to lose—that! My poor, poor husband!

Mercifully, all ends well. Just three days later Alma is reporting breathlessly: “Rapture without end.”

Meanwhile Anaïs Nin, whose diaries have all the relentless circularity of soft porn, adopts a similarly frothing tone on June 8, 1933, writing about an encounter with her lover Antonin Artaud: “And now I step warily into Artaud’s fantastic regions, and he, too, lays heavy hands on me, on my body, and like the mandragora at the touch of human hands, I shriek.” Two weeks later Nin is having sex with her biological father, an experience that is only slightly spoiled by “some sense of guilt.” At least this time there was no shrieking.

The one aspect of sex that seems to have attracted forensic attention from the upper-class diarists was the business of begetting an heir. What would happen if the firstborn male turned out to be unsuited to carrying the honor and wealth of the family into the next generation? Lady Cynthia Asquith’s eldest boy, John, born 1911, would today perhaps be diagnosed with autism, but in the early twentieth century he seemed “simple,” “dotty,” or just very badly behaved. On July 31, 1916, Asquith describes going into the schoolroom to see the unpromising eight-year-old do his lessons: “It gives you the impression of a…performing animal.” A year later, and more anxious than ever, Asquith consults Teresina, a celebrated palmist, who tells her not to despair and, crucially, “not to ‘turn against him.’” (Friends and family had been accusing her of doing just that.) Teresina’s wise words seem to have brought only temporary comfort, since a few months later Asquith records:

Woke up to terrible morning misery. The dreary detail of the John tragedy blackens life…. I loved my idea of that baby more than I have ever loved anything—and it was just something that never existed!

Fifteen years later the question of a child’s nonexistence was weighing heavily on Anne Lindbergh. The circumstances in which she lost her first child are infamous—twenty-month-old Charles Jr. was kidnapped in 1932 and murdered in a botched attempt to raise ransom money from his wealthy aviator father. When, after an agonizing wait of ten weeks, Lindbergh finally gets the news that her son’s body has been found, she describes it as a kind of relief: “If you can say ‘then he was living,’ ‘then he was dead,’ it is final and finalities can be accepted.”

Isabella Beeton makes no mention of her many dead, stillborn, and miscarried babies in her diary. I know because earlier this year I got the chance to acquire from her descendants the tiny maroon-covered pocketbook for myself. In the twenty-five years since I first started researching Beeton’s life for a biography, I’ve been on a personal mission to reunite all her personal manuscripts, which had become scattered across branches of her family, a common state of affairs with small, informal archives. Beeton is best known as the author of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), a behemoth that sold millions of copies and remains an instantly recognizable brand in Great Britain and its former colonies. She kept the diary for only a few weeks in 1860, the year before her domestic bible started its ascent to global dominance. It measures just four by three inches, and the cheap lined pages are not preprinted with dates. Strictly speaking, then, this is not a diary so much as a notebook, a hybrid crossing several genres in the manner of the extracts in Secret Voices. And, tantalizingly, there are a few pages that have been neatly removed.

Beeton’s little book is, first and foremost, a travel journal covering a trip to Paris in March 1860, full of descriptions of famous sights and buildings. Like many of Gristwood’s diarists, Beeton kept hers for only a brief period at a moment when the jolted routine of her life allowed space for this new habit. There may have been a sentimental imperative, too—she had last been to Paris on her honeymoon four years earlier, and this was the first time that she and her husband, Sam, had been able to return together.

The unassuming maroon notebook also functioned as an ad hoc business plan. The Beetons had come to town to negotiate a contract with the Goubaud family, proprietors of Le Moniteur de la mode, an elegant monthly magazine that included hand-tinted engravings of the latest French fashions. The British couple, who were about to take their homely Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine upmarket and into color, were seeking to strike a deal in which they could reprint fashion plates from the Moniteur every month. It was a gamble and would mean increasing the cover price of EDM from two pence to six pence, a move that would eat into their current circulation of 60,000. At the back of her diary Beeton, who was an equal partner in the business, has done the sums, totting up costs versus profits and concluding that if they can sell 12,000 copies of the EDM in its smart new iteration each month, the arrangement “just pays.”

Beeton’s financial recordkeeping did not stop there. Flipping again to the back of the book—diarists are under no obligation to stick to any particular page order—she tallies up the costs of their Parisian petits déjeuners and dîners, checking off each item against the carefully retained receipts. At Hôtel due Palais Royal she notes a “beautiful dinner for 2 francs, wine included,” a reminder that the early practice of diary-keeping grew out of a tradition that was as much concerned with accurate household accounting as with spiritual self-‌examination.

Domestic matters drew Beeton to Paris, too. Her surviving child, left behind in London, was now nine months old, and she hoped to hire a French nursemaid so that the boy could acquire the language skills that would be useful when he inherited the family business. Beeton records meetings with a series of eager bonnes, each of whom is deemed unsatisfactory on account of poor needlework or “bad character.” (She remained easily spooked by the British prejudice that the French, and Frenchwomen in particular, were of doubtful moral standing.)

Finally, contained within these cheap covers is the draft of a comic novel, or at least an amusing magazine piece. Isabella Beeton wrote many articles anonymously for the EDM, and her description of catching an omnibus in Paris reads like a self-conscious experiment with voice and a nod to the reigning author of the day, Charles Dickens:

I thought the vehicle was quite full, but [we] were obliged to cram in a very stout english lady with a huge crinoline. Stowed her among [us] all right, but the question arose, “Where was her husband to go.[”] One proposed he should lie down in the middle with his legs out of window, another that he should sit in his wife’s lap, but he saw the impossibility of this proceeding & jumped up outside.

We don’t generally associate Mrs. Beeton with this kind of whimsy. At that very moment her Book of Household Management was becoming famous throughout the Anglophone world for its sternness on such matters as how many eggs it took to make a Victoria sponge or what to pay your under-footman. It may be, though, that March 1860 found the young woman in an unusually relaxed and playful mood. Since marrying at the age of twenty, four years earlier, she had experienced a string of miscarriages and stillbirths and the death of one infant after only three months. Now, though, it looked as though her luck might have changed—this was the first time she felt sufficiently confident about her baby’s health to leave him at home.

Prolepsis, though, is doing its usual cruel work. I know, while Isabella Beeton does not, that nine-month-old Sam will soon be dead. What is more, in five years’ time she will join him in Norwood Cemetery, having expired a week after giving birth to another son. And it is this boy, Mayson Moss Beeton, who will take it upon himself to become the family archivist, keeping all the Beetons’ most precious documents safe, including the diary of the mother he never knew.