Life Writing

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My Diary Diary

Laura Bissell

To cite this article: Laura Bissell (14 Dec 2023): My Diary Diary, Life Writing, DOI:
10.1080/14484528.2023.2273358
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LIFE WRITING
https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2023.2273358

My Diary Diary
Laura Bissell
Research Knowledge Exchange, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This project uses diary writing as a methodology for undertaking Diaries; women; feminism;
research into 11 diaries of women writers. Part autoethnography, life writing; praxis
part critical discussion, my diary diary charts a month of reading
diaries, reading about diaries and keeping a diary every working
day. The curated journals are read in relation to each other to try
to understand legacies of how the diary form has allowed them
to write themselves while also contributing to wider knowledge
about women’s lives and feminisms. This essay seeks discussion
of the diary form and evidence of the lived experiences of
women within the journals, charting how societal expectations
and conventions around what women’s role should be, within a
range of historical contexts, is often in conflict with the
individual’s desire for self-development, creativity and a
meaningful life. The diary provides a space for rebellion, for living
the desired (private) life of thought and opinion and self-
expression. By bringing individual works together into a curated
lineage of women’s diaries, I seek affinities, connections and the
role the diary plays in both writing the self and also
understanding the context of women’s writings on their own
lives, offering my diary diary as part of this ongoing feminist work.

The Diary dealing always with the immediate present, the warm, the near, being written at
white heat, developed a love of the living moment, of the immediate emotional reaction to
experience, which revealed the power of recreation to lie in the sensibilities rather than in
memory or critical intellectual perception.

The Diary, creating a vast tapestry, a web, exposing constantly the relation between past and
present, weaving meticulously the invisible interaction, noting the repetitions of themes,
developed in the sense of the totality of personality, this tale without beginning or end
which encloses all things, and relates all things, as a strong antidote to the unrelatedness,
incoherence and disintegration of the modern man. I could follow the inevitable pattern
and obtain a large, panoramic view of character. Anaïs Nin, ‘On Writing’ (1947).

Introduction
Alba de Céspedes’ 1952 novel, Forbidden Notebook, opens with the line ‘I was wrong
to buy this notebook, very wrong.’ Writing down one’s innermost feelings,

CONTACT Laura Bissell [email protected]

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
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or with their consent.
2 L. BISSELL

documenting lived experiences in your own voice, as a woman, has historically been
perceived as subversive; a waste of time away from the service of others. In this
study I read the diaries of women, some who define themselves as writers or acti-
vists, others who are known for having lived through an extraordinary moment in
history, and undertake a process of journal keeping to explore diary writing as a
way of actualising the self. I seek to trace feminist lineages through their words
and, through writing my own diary, explore what role individual diaries (written
for the self) can contribute to collective knowledge and understanding about
women’s lives.
Although this is a diary about diaries, it is also a diary written by me, and therefore
I anticipate that my life will become part of this, that my day-to-day experiences will
end up in these pages. I am a white Scottish woman, an academic, a feminist, a
partner, a mother. I am also a writer, and I have kept diaries on and off for most
of my life. As a teenager, the thought of someone reading my diaries sent a cold
trickle of fear down my spine. But, as a forty-year-old, I am less precious about
my inner thoughts and therefore open to prising open what this diary about diaries
might become and understanding how the critical and the personal can exist side-
by-side.

Method
I use diarising as a methodology for undertaking this research and for writing the article
chronologically with minimal editing and revision. It follows the ‘first thought, best
thought’ of the beat poets, and is as true to a diary form as I can make it.1
Some decisions I have made:
I only engage with the diaries of women.
I refer to the diarists by their first names, not their surnames as is common in academic
writing.2
I approach my diary reading as I do my diary writing, that is, to work instinctually and spon-
taneously.
I have excluded memoirs, autobiographies and letters, focusing on diaries only.3
I only engage with written diaries.4
I have accessed published diaries, this means that there is an imbalance in the voices that are
there, with a Eurocentric and American focus.
I seek discussion of the diary form within the diaries I engage with.
I seek evidence of feminist thought and examples of diary writing as a feminist praxis.
I take the period of one month, working Monday–Friday for the month of May 2023.

An important note: these diaries have been made available through processes of col-
lating, editing, curating (in some cases, translating), and disseminating to a market.
The role of the editor/translator must be acknowledged, as their role in selecting a
passage or choice of word, for example, affects how the reader understands the
person who wrote the diary. Almost all of the published diaries start with a
preface or introduction, so the words the reader first encounters are not those of
the diarist but their editor. I intend to treat this aspect sensitively, considering
how these prefatory materials might influence readings of the diaries themselves
(Figure 1).
 LIFE WRITING 3

Figure 1. The diaries.

1st May
I begin my diary on the first of the month, satisfyingly also the first day of the week, a
Monday.5 Where to start? I am drawn to the oldest of the diaries I have selected. The Gos-
samer Years (Kagerō Nikki) was written by an unnamed noblewoman of Heian Japan,
translated by Edward Seidensticker, and collates diary entries over a period of 21 years
4 L. BISSELL

from 954 onwards into three books. Described by the translator as a ‘combined autobio-
graphy-diary’, the writer is a noblewoman known today as ‘the mother of Michitsuna’
and the diaries document, amongst other aspects of her life, her marriage to Fujiwara
Kaneie and her anger at his many mistresses and other wives during this period.
Seidensticker claims that, ‘The diary is in a sense her protest against the marriage
system of the time, and her exposition of the thesis that men are beasts’ (1973, 8).
I sense a feminist preoccupation with equality, even in this historical context.
Kagerō writes of herself in the third person: ‘Perhaps, she said to herself, even the story
of her own dreary life, set down in a journal, might be of interest; and it might also
answer a question: had that life been one befitting a well-born lady?’ (33). This beginning,
from the earliest of the diaries I am engaging with, encapsulates some of the aspects of
diaries that had provoked me to undertake this research. The idea that, perhaps, as the
author dares to think, even my story may be of interest, and it might also provide a docu-
ment for remembering and reflection, for capturing a life over time, as written by the
person living it.

2nd May
I resist the urge to move on to the next diary in the chronology, instead jumping to The Jour-
nals of Anaïs Nin: Volume One. I have owned this book for some time; in fact, I think it was
my parents’ book as the 1970s artwork of a pink face with a yellow hairline and lips and dark
green eyeshadow lurks as a memory from my childhood (Figure 2). I am ashamed to say I
have not read any of Anaïs’ literary works, although my sister bought me a secondhand copy
of Henry and June for Christmas and it waits to be read in a perilous pile of books above my
bed. Although, as mentioned, I remain cautious regarding introductions, I start with this, to
understand a little of the context of Anaïs’ life. She began her diary in 1914 aged 11 and wrote
in French for six years before changing to English in 1920. The 35,000 pages of her hand-
written journals are now in the Special Collections Department of the University of Califor-
nia Los Angeles. I learn that Anaïs herself viewed her published novels and stories as ‘merely
outcroppings of the diary, and that her real life, as a writer and a woman, was contained in
the pages of her journal’ (1978, 1). She states: ‘I have a natural flow in the diary, what I
produce outside is a distillation, the myth, the poem.’
While her diaries were renowned for her circle of friends, many of whom became
famous artists and thinkers (Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, Otto Rank), editor Gunther
Stuhlmann argues that what is revealed in Anaïs’ diaries are, for the first time, ‘a passionate,
detailed, articulate record of a modern woman’s journey of self-discovery’ (3).
Anaïs writes:
What I have to say, is really distinct from the artist and art. It is the woman who has to speak.
And it is not only the woman Anaïs who has to speak, but I have to speak for many women.
As I discover myself, I feel I am merely one of many, a symbol. I begin to understand women
of yesterday and today. The mute ones of the past, the inarticulate, who took refuge behind
wordless intuitions, and the women of today, all action and copies of men. And I, in
between … .’ (ibid.)

Already I hear an echo, the voice of the nameless Japanese noblewoman hoping that her
dreary life might be of interest and provide an example of a well-lived life befitting her
 LIFE WRITING 5

Figure 2. The Journals of Anaïs Nin: Volume One.

station, and Anaïs’ acknowledgement as she writes that she writes as herself, but also as a
spokesperson for other women. Anaïs suggests knowingly that, in writing her thoughts in
this way, sharing her reflections on the world as she sees it, she is breaking new ground
for women’s voices.
6 L. BISSELL

Anaïs wrote in June 1993: ‘I only regret that everybody wants to deprive me of the
journal, which is the only steadfast friend I have, the only one which makes my life bear-
able … In the journal I am at ease’ (6). She wrote in a letter to her father: ‘These days I feel
like abdicating as a writer. It suddenly seems monstrous to me to expose the feelings once
had, even those in the past, even the dead ones’ (7). This is reminiscent of Melissa Febos’
discussion of British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s statement, ‘it is a joy to be hidden
and a disaster not to be found’ (2022, 26), alongside the words of William H. Gass, ‘[t]o
have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster’ (ibid.). What
is monstrous about capturing your feelings and revealing them? Or is this behaviour only
monstrous if women do it? Lauren Elkin writes in Art Monsters (2023): ‘The art monster,
with her diaristic indulgence and her personal clutter, takes for granted that the experi-
ences of female embodiment are relevant to all human kind’ (19), arguing that, whoever
we are, we may lay claim to the personal self not only as worthy of the eyes of others but
necessary to attend to ‘as the foundation for an ethical way of being in the world’ (ibid.).

3rd May
Last night before going to sleep I picked up Henry and June. Upon opening the book, I
realised this was not a novel, but instead an edited section of Anaïs’ diaries that focuses
on her relationship with writer Henry Miller and his wife June. When Anaïs’ diaries
were published in the mid-1950s they had been edited to protect her husband Hugh
Guiler (and others). This omission of her personal life, husband and lovers is described
by Rupert Pole as an ‘ingenious accomplishment’. Henry and June re-examines the same
period (1931 onwards) but this time includes material deleted from the original diary
and never before published. As executor of her estate, Rupert comments ‘It was Anaïs’s
wish to have the full story told’ (1986, vii). I immediately recognise her first meeting
with Henry Miller, when he is laughing on account of the colours, the wine, the ‘wonderful
moment’ over dinner with Anaïs and Hugh. What the diary entries in Henry and June
reveal is that, after this, Hugh expresses his concern to his wife that he will lose her to
Henry. Not only do editors modify the diaries, curate the entries and select material, in
this instance the author herself has done so, to avoid hurting those around her. What
the extended diary version of Henry and June does, is reveal the sexual subtext of her
encounters with Henry, which escalate. I read Anaïs’ diary yesterday as her truth but, in
this new iteration of the material, alternative realities and relationships have been revealed.
Today, I take a different approach—I scan the first diary on the top of my pile looking
for today’s date, 3rd May. What was happening on this date in this person’s life? In Anne
Frank’s diary on this date in 1944, she addresses her diary as ‘Kitty’ and opens with the
statement that they are having a holiday from politics and she wonders what has hap-
pened to their pet cat Moffi, surmising that he may already be in cat heaven, has been
eaten or used to make a fur hat. The questions Anne asks of war and humankind still
feel as relevant today as when she scribbled them in her diary in 1944. Anne writes:
As you can imagine, we often ask ourselves here despairingly ‘what, oh what is the use of
war? Why can’t people live peaceably together? Why all this destruction?’ … Why should
millions be spent daily on the war and yet there is not a penny available for medical services,
artists and poor people? Why do some people have to starve while there are surpluses rotting
in other parts of the world. Oh, why are people so crazy? (1995, 193).
 LIFE WRITING 7

It is also notable to me that, in my first three dabblings into these women’s diaries, they
have all referenced the diary form; why they write it, who it is for. Diary writing as forging
a path, of finding a way. Anne says: ‘I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure,
romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary I treat all the privations as
amusing. I have made up my mind now to lead a different life from other girls, and
later on, different from ordinary housewives’ (194). Anaïs wrote of herself as being a
symbol for women; here, Anne is also articulating a desire to break free from the conven-
tional roles of womanhood, to be a writer. Diary writing as a way of knowing the self,
claiming the self, defining it on one’s own terms.
I look for the same date in another war-time chronicle by a young girl in Sarajevo, Zlata
Filipic, who wrote her diary in the 1990s during the war in the Balkans. She was 11 when
she began her diary, the same age at which Anaïs started her own. On 3rd May 1992, Zlata’s
diary is addressed to Mimmy. It is a short entry in which 11-year-old Zlata’s daddy runs
across the bridge over the Miljacka river to get to her grandparents. She describes him
as ‘all upset, sweating with fear and sadness’ (2006, 41). Zlata explains how the heavy shel-
ling has destroyed shop windows, cars, apartments and building facades and roofs, describ-
ing it as ‘terrible’. My eye is caught by the last line in the diary entry from the previous day,
Saturday 2nd May 1992: ‘This has been the worst, most awful day in my eleven-year-old
life’ (ibid.). I return to the start of the entry to find out what has happened. Zlata describes
a day of shooting in Sarajevo, the president being captured, the streets destroyed, and her
family hiding in the cellar, which she thinks of as damp and smelly but then realises is
saving their lives and perceives as ‘warm and nice’. The newly renovated post office
burns and her father tries to photograph it but says his camera will not work because
Zlata has fiddled with something on it, which makes her sorry. Zlata’s entries are
shorter, more descriptive, and moments like this when she gets in trouble with her
father remind me that she is the youngest diarist in my collection. I have usurped my
own system, moved back in time, to find out what happened the day before.
Diary reading as becoming a time traveller. Anne’s wartime diary was written nearly 80
years ago, Zlata’s over 30 years ago. I learn that, in 1993, Zlata was being referred to as
‘the Anne Frank of Sarajevo’ (2006, xxi). Diary writing as echo. Both reflect on war and its
impacts: diary writing as a chronicle. I was nine in 1992 and remember seeing the siege of
Sarajevo on TV. Zlata describes her diary in the introduction as: ‘a record of a conflict
that many people have forgotten about and that has been replaced in our collective
memory by numerous other conflicts’ (vii). Diary writing as a collective memory; diary
reading as attempting to understand the lives of others.
Zlata writes: ‘I still find it baffling that this diary, these scribblings of mine that I orig-
inally started writing for myself, even became a book, let alone that people are still
reading it today’ (vii). She reflects on how she felt strange about keeping a diary after pub-
lication and so avoided it for many years, however: ‘as soon as I was bothered, sad, or
worried, I knew where to turn to first—the diary’. She continues:
And it is still here today, as a confidante, a way of getting things out of my heart and my
head, a way of getting some perspective on problems and ideas. Everything feels so much
different and easier when it is externalised on a blank page that does not judge or say any-
thing back … I think it was really important for me to have written during the war, because
in the madness that was around me, in the uncontrollable fear and uncertainty, the only
space I had that I could truly control was writing in my diary. (xiii)
8 L. BISSELL

Zlata reflects on the way in which the humanity and strength of the community is part of
the diary and, in this way, the diary also belongs to the many people who experienced the
war, claiming ‘it belongs to my city’ (xiv). What is notable about Zlata’s diary is that,
when it was published, it became her family’s route out of the war, at a time when no
one was permitted to leave Sarajevo. Her questions echo Anne’s, ‘why do horrors of
incredible scale still happen in the twenty-first century?’ (xviii).

4th May
Today I pick up Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In 1861, the year the
Civil War started, Harriet published her story of one black female slave’s escape to
freedom. She used the pseudonym Linda Brent but the story is hers, reflecting on her
lived experience of being reduced to chattel by white slave owners, including her
sexual objectification and abuse. The slaves who learned to read and write were the
first to run away and Harriet was an example of this.
As I begin to read, I realise I have made an error and inadvertently broken one of my own
rules: to exclude memoirs, autobiographies and letters and focus on diaries only. Although
seemingly in a diary form, this book is an autobiography, beginning in childhood and
recounting experiences chronologically. What are the differences between a diary and an
autobiography? An autobiography assumes a position of reflection, of looking back on a
life lived. A diary is daily (or regular) scribbling, a document of the present, without the dis-
tance, structure or perspective of an autobiography. When I wrote my own account of my
experience of pregnancy and motherhood, I drew heavily from my daily journal; its contents
provided the material for my memoir (Bissell 2021). For this reason, and because the subject
matter is so connected to my query (and compelling), I decide to allow for my error and
include Harriet’s story within this study. If I am exploring diary writing as a feminist
praxis, the impetus for her telling her own story, and the way in which she did it, was to
try to appeal to those feminists who might care about the gender inequalities evident in
her story, to encourage them to support racial equality. This early intersectionality is an
important aspect to include and so I read on.
Harriet writes: ‘Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of
my adventures may seem incredible, but they are, nevertheless, strictly true’ (2001, 2).
Harriet confesses that she has not had much leisure time to improve herself, only able
to write when she could ‘snatch an hour from household duties’ (ibid.). This acknowledg-
ment of writing in between her woman’s work, her labour, is something that many of my
diarists will have experienced, but that she was able to do this while enslaved makes her
commitment to writing her story even more remarkable. Harriet explains:
I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself; on the contrary, it
would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history. Neither do I
care to incite sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do earnestly desire to arouse women of
the North to a realising sense of the condition of two million women in the South, still in
bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. (2–3)

When reflecting on her childhood, Harriet says that her upbringing was so sheltered that
she was unaware that she was a piece of ‘merchandise’, nor that, when her father died
suddenly, the slave-owners felt that he had spoiled his children by teaching them to
feel that they were human beings: ‘this was a blasphemous doctrine for a slave to
 LIFE WRITING 9

teach, presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters’ (12). Diary writing as rebel-
lion, as aspiration for freedom.

5th May
I am up early as it is the day of my friends’ wedding and so I want to make sure I have
read and written my diary before we attend the event. As nuptials are on my mind, I am
drawn to The Journals of Sylvia Plath. I know Sylvia’s work, having read her semi-auto-
biographical novel The Bell Jar as a teenager, and I am aware that she was famously
married to the poet Ted Hughes. I have owned this collection of her writings since I
was 17.
I scan the index of the tome for ‘marriage’. There are multiple entries. I turn to page
105 to read Sylvia’s thoughts on this at the time, aged nineteen. There is little about mar-
riage initially; it is all about sex. The entry begins a few pages earlier: 15th May 1952. She
reflects on how she has not written in her diary for a while, her writing coming in other
forms: ‘Dust lies along the edges of my book, and my lusts and little ideas have gone
spurting in other ways—in sonnets, in stories, and in letters’ (2000, 103).
While she aims for ‘Fulbrights, prizes, Europe, publication, males’ (ibid.), she focuses on
her physical experiences; going, seeing, doing, thinking, feeling, desiring ‘[w]ith the eyes,
the brain, the intestines, the vagina’ (ibid.). The phrase ‘a refined hedonism’ is underlined
(105). It makes me think about emphasis. I wish I could see all of the diarists’ handwriting,
as though I could know them better through the traces of the letters they have formed.
Sylvia reflects that D.H. Lawrence did have something after all and I am reminded that
Anaïs’ first book was on Lawrence and that she wrote it in 16 days. Threads of connection;
diarists sharing reading experiences across the decades. Sylvia writes:
And there it is: when asked what role I will plan to fill, I say: ‘What do you mean role? I plan
not to step into a part on marrying—but to go on living as an intelligent mature human being,
growing and learning as I always have. No shift, no radical change in life habits.’ Never will
there be a circle, signifying me and my operations, confined solely to home, other womenfolk
and community service, enclosed in the larger worldly circle of my mate. (ibid.)

Sylvia adds: ‘It is only balance that I ask for. Not the continual subordination of one
person’s desires and interests to the continual advancement of another’s! That would
be too grossly unfair’ (106). The inequalities in her teenage relationship are clear; she cri-
ticises his superiority complex (which she acknowledges she also has to a certain extent),
and says that he patronises her. Worse than that, he describes poetry as ‘so much incon-
sequential dust’ (107). Sylvia responds:
The fact remains that writing is a way of life for me: And writing not just from a pragmatic,
money-earning point of view either. Granted, I consider publication a token of value and a
confirmation of ability—but writing takes practice, continual practice. (108)

Diary writing as a way of life

8th May
King Charles was crowned on Saturday. My husband was in London last week and said
there was bunting and pageantry everywhere. Not so in Scotland. Perhaps because I have
10 L. BISSELL

been thinking of London, I am drawn to Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, written

between her London home and the sixteenth-century monk’s house she and her
husband owned in Rodmell in the South of England. This is the only diary on my
Kindle and, because of this, dipping into it feels different. I have recently been reading
Olivia Laing’s To the River, in which she traces the River Ouse, where Virginia
drowned herself to end her life after a lifelong struggle with depression. Sylvia’s and Vir-
ginia’s diaries have been read together, as famous female writers who both ended their
lives by suicide and, although I move from Sylvia to Virginia, my intention is not to
focus on their illnesses but instead attempt to hear their voices through their writing.
Virginia writes on Sunday 6th March:
The general line will be that I am becoming too much in love with my own voice, not much
in what I write; indecently affected; a disagreeable woman. The truth is, I expect, that I shan’t
get very much attention anywhere. Yet I become rather well known. (loc. cit. 434)

The consequences of the public perception of her as a woman writer are evident in her
next entry, specifically recorded as Friday, April 8th, 10 min to 11. a.m.:
And I ought to be writing Jacob’s Room, and I can’t, and instead I will write down the reason
why I can’t—this diary being a kindly blankfaced old confidante. Well, you see, I’m a failure
as a writer. I’m out of fashion; old; shan’t do any better: have no headpiece: the spring is
everywhere, my book out (prematurely) and nipped, a damp firework. (loc. cit. 443)

These doubts about her ability as a writer circulate with ponderings about the reviews,
and what people think about her work. She confesses, ‘I thought of never writing any
more.’ Diary writing as saying the unsayable, thinking the unthinkable.
I read Virginia’s Mrs Dalloway in my first year at university and then encountered it
again recently in my re-reading of Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017). Sara writes:
For Clarissa the rather uncanny sensation of becoming Mrs Dalloway as a loss of possibility,
as an unbecoming, or becoming nothing at all, does not enter her consciousness in the form
of sadness about something … so much sadness revealed in the need to be busy. So much
grief expressed in the need not to be overwhelmed by grief. (59)

I think of Virginia’s walking stick found by her husband, Leonard, floating on the River
Ouse. On 28th March 1941, he wrote a letter to their friend Vita Sackville-West:
[Virginia] has been really very ill these last weeks & was terrified that she was going mad again. It
was, I suppose, the strain of the war & finishing her book […] I think she has drowned herself, as
I found her stick floating in the river, but we have not yet found the body.6

9th May
Leonard’s letter suggesting that the strain of the war was a factor in Virginia’s suicide still
on my mind, I turn to another wartime diary. Iris Murdoch is one of my favourite nove-
lists, and I have also read some of her philosophical works; however, I only found out
about her book A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1938–46 when I embarked on
this project.7 I do not engage with the intimate correspondence between Frank and
David, and instead read Iris’ diaries. I am surprised to learn that she was an actress
but, when I think of some of her novels, I realise I am perhaps not too shocked after
all. As if my thoughts yesterday had been overheard, the inside cover of A Writer at
 LIFE WRITING 11

War is covered in her handwriting, addresses, diagrams, all penned by her. I study the
shape of the letters—a clear, concise hand. Her letter G reminds me of my four-year-
old daughter’s writing (Figure 3).
In Peter Conradi’s preface, he writes about how the film that was made two years after
her death (which he consulted on but was not happy with) portraying a young Iris
(played by Kate Winslet) and the older Iris suffering from dementia (Dame Judi
Dench) reduced her to her physicality with no reference to the freedom of her mind.
This depiction of her as ‘bonking’ (sexual when younger) and ‘bonkers’ (suffering
from Alzheimer’s at the end of her life) is critiqued by her friend (2010, 10). While
this is a specific example of Iris’ life as told, not through her writing but through her
body, it made me think of how, in a misogynistic world where women are judged and
remembered on the basis of their physical selves, diaries can offer a counter-narrative
to the stories that are told about them. If one of Britain’s most celebrated novelists is
depicted in a film about her life without featuring a single word that she wrote or
spoke, what of those women who are not able to write prolifically? What can a diary
do, if not externally, but internally to counter the feeling of being an object? Diary
writing as enacting power. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger talks about how a woman is
always ‘accompanied by her own image of herself … From earliest childhood she has
been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually’ (1972, 45). He argues that
these two constituent yet always distinct elements of surveyor and surveyed make up
her identity as a woman. Diary writing as writing the mind, being more than a body.

Figure 3. Inside cover of Iris Murdoch’s A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1938–46.
12 L. BISSELL

Peter Conradi writes that this collection of her own writings shows Iris, in contrast to the
simplification of her life after her death, ‘as a person vividly alive and fascinated by the world,
trying to make sense of it by writing it down, seeking to be in charge of her own destiny’
(2010, 11). He states that, ‘in these writings she walks and talks and lives once more’
(ibid.). Diary writing as re-enactment, as resurrection. Iris edited her 1939 journal in 1988
and around this time also destroyed journals from the 1940s.8 Peter indicates that it is
impossible to know what has been removed but suggests that she is protecting her
husband and that her own story is ‘streamlined and sanitised’ (21). Diary writing as
refining your story. The voice I encounter in The Magpie Journals, of a nineteen-year-old
Iris, is not the novelist I recognise. The diary is written in notes; it reminds me of my child-
hood diaries and is not Sylvia’s verbose prose nor Virginia’s careful, critical sentences. Iris’
journals are a galloping list of the activities of the day, the people, the work needing to be
done for the shows, her humour and Irish brogue coming through. On 24th August, she
writes of a performance of the Magpie Players in Filkins village hall: ‘The theatre may
have been paradise but the audience was purgatory’ (3).

10th May
I injured my back this morning so am reading and writing my diaries in bed, an ice-pack at
my sacrum. I have encountered Susan Sontag’s work occasionally in my research within the
field of the performing arts. At my colleague Simon Murray’s launch of his book, Performing
Ruins (2020), he spoke about Susan directing the famous Samuel Beckett play Waiting for
Godot in a candlelit theatre in the Bosnian capital, cut off from its electricity supply for
three and a half years during the siege. To me, Iris has been a novelist and philosopher,
Susan an essayist and activist; however, in the last two days, I have learned about their
work in the theatre. Susan’s Godot, performed on 17th August 1993, became a symbol of
the city’s cultural resistance (164). I think of Zlata, age 11 during the war, scribbling in
her diary, and of Susan, purposely situating herself within the war-torn country to do her
work while filling her own journal pages with her thoughts.
The secondhand copy of Reborn I had ordered for this project arrived in the post only
yesterday, so I am eager to find out what the author of On Photography and Illness as
Metaphor writes in her personal journals. The preface by her son David Reiff acknowl-
edges that this is not the book she would have produced and that he did not know if
she wanted her diaries to be made public, stating that the decision to publish them
was his alone, made after his mother died leaving no instructions regarding what to
do with her unpublished writing. Unlike other work that had been delivered through lec-
tures and for which his mother’s intention in terms of audience was clear, the diaries
‘were written solely for herself’ (2008, viii). When she became ill for the last time,
there were more than 100 diaries, from her adolescence to old age, and the only conver-
sation they had about them was a whispered sentence from Susan to her son, ‘You know
where the diaries are.’ David did know where they were but had been given no indication
of what to do with the neatly arranged notebooks lined up in his mother’s walk-in closet.
David reflects that he might never have published them at all, and had even thought
about burning them. However, Susan had already sold her papers to the University of
California Los Angeles library, thus if he did not publish them someone else would;
they would appear in public nonetheless. He writes:
 LIFE WRITING 13

My misgivings remain. To say that these diaries are self-revelatory is an understatement. I

have chosen to include a lot of my mother’s very severe judgements. She was a great ‘judger’.
But to expose that quality in her—and these diaries are replete with exposures—is inevitably
to invite the reader to judge her. (ix)

Diary writing as being revealed. I think of Susan’s writing on photography, on how this
term can refer to the self, and also to film; the exposure to light that will determine the
outcome of the photograph, its textures, its emphasis. Would she have wanted her diaries
to be published? The unknown of it, the unsaid. David writes that she was not a self-
revealing person, particularly about her homosexuality, ‘so [his] decision certainly vio-
lates her privacy. There is no other way of describing it fairly’ (ix–x). Diary reading as
violation, as exposing the private.
Although I am keen to get to the diaries, Susan’s son’s framing of the complexity of the
decision to publish them intrigues me as it teases out many of the questions I have been
contemplating in response to these women’s words. Who are the diaries for? When you
become famous, do your private words then become the property of others? What if
women become ‘symbols’, as Anaïs said; does publishing their diary writings expand pos-
sibilities for other women? Or is it a violation, another way of owning a part of them?
David says of his mother that ‘she was as uncomfortable with her body as she was
serene about her mind’ (xiii), and that he wants to shout at her, ‘Don’t be so hard on
yourself!’ or ‘Don’t do it!’ He reflects: ‘But of course I am too late: the play has already
been performed and its protagonist has gone … what remains is pain and ambition.
These journals oscillate between them. Would my mother have wanted them
exposed?’ (ibid.). He ends the preface by stating that the diaries include things that he
would have preferred not to know, or for others not to know, but one thing he was
certain of was that, as a reader and a writer, his mother loved diaries and letters—‘the
more intimate the better’ (xiv) —and hopes that for this reason his mother would
have approved of him sharing them with the world.

11th May
Looking back at yesterday, I realise that Peter Conradi’s criticism of the film Iris applies to me
too—I read Susan through the words of another. I am annoyed at myself for encountering
Susan through the thoughts of her son, although I found what he was saying compelling.
Today, to counter this, I will return to Reborn, and this time only read the diary entries them-
selves. I will hear her in her own words, I will listen to her voice.
The first entry on 23rd November 1947 is framed as a list. It begins:
I believe:
(a) That there is no personal god or life after death
(b) That the most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself
(c) That the only difference between human beings is intelligence
(d) That the only criterion of an action is its ultimate effect on making the individual happy
or unhappy
(e) That it is wrong to deprive any man of life
[entries ‘f’ and ‘g’ are missing]
(h) I believe, furthermore, that an ideal state (besides ‘g’) should be a strong centra-
lized one with government control of public utilities, banks, mines + transportation and
14 L. BISSELL

subsidy of the arts, a comfortable minimum wage, support of disabled and age[d], state
care of pregnant women with no distinction such as legitimate + illegitimate children.
(2008, 3)

In 1947 Susan was 14, but able to sum up both her personal and societal beliefs and
philosophies of life in this list. I am intrigued by the missing entries. Omitted by her?
Removed by her son? Illegible? Diaries as puzzles, as fragments that can never quite
make up the whole.
A single line from 13th April 1948: ‘Ideas disturb the levelness of life’ (4). I ponder this
for a moment and read on. She says, ‘If I can hold myself to these vows! For I can feel
myself slipping, wavering—at certain times even accepting the idea of staying home
for college’ (5). She calls her parents’ lives rotten and dreary, then asks regarding her
mother: ‘How can I hurt her more, beaten as she is, never resisting?’
Before I close Susan’s diary for the morning, I am drawn to a heavily underlined
section from later that same day. She has written about a wasted evening with her step-
father Nathan Sontag, having gone for a driving lesson and then to a movie that she pre-
tended to enjoy. She says:
After writing this last sentence, I read it again and consider[ed] erasing it. I should let it
stand though.—it is useless for me to record only the satisfying parts of my existence—
(There are too few of them anyway!) Let me note all the sickening waste of today, that I
shall not be easy with myself and compromise my tomorrows. (7)

Diary writing as honesty with the self, as a record of the spectrum of emotions and feelings.
Here, the underlining perhaps also stands as a reminder to her future self of how to live—
diary writing as a guide.

12th May
I look at my final diary of the selection I have chosen today, Sarah Morgan’s tome The
Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman.9 She was 19 when she began writing her diary
in January 1862, nine months into America’s Civil War. A contemporary of Harriet
Jacobs, Sarah’s account is written from her perspective as a white woman born into an
ordinary family who questions the society she lives in and reflects on the war she lives
through. I notice that war-time diaries of women make up a large part of the published
material available and acknowledge that this is perhaps due to the market for chronicles
of war rather than women’s stories in particular. Despite this, the publication of war-time
diaries has meant that these women diarists have had readers for their thoughts.
Before I begin to read, the book falls open at page 407. Inside is a folded-up piece of
paper with printed text on the back, a statement of some kind. In a bid to be more envir-
onmentally sustainable, I recently pledged to buy only secondhand books, so this has
come from a used book seller. I wonder if it is a receipt but, when I unfold the paper,
it is a bank statement addressed to the previous owner of the book, a woman based in
Cheshire, detailing annual interest accrued from 6 April 1999 to 5 April 2000. I know
instinctively that Mrs B S has been using this folded-up bank statement as a bookmark.
There is another bookmark between pages six and seven. It is a seventeenth-century
nun’s prayer typed on yellowing card, with a statement at the bottom: ‘The title of this
prayer is traditional, the source is unknown.’ Rather than traditional, however, the
 LIFE WRITING 15

content of the prayer appears written for the modern day. Who is the author? Did the
previous owner of this book want to highlight something on page six or seven by insert-
ing this marker? Did she ever finish the book or was the bank statement wedged between
pages 406 and 407 her final resting point 23 years ago? I imagine her reading Sarah
Morgan’s thoughts and then placing the folded-up bank statement to mark her place
before she retires to bed or answers the door or tucks the book in her bag as she gets
off a train. Diary reading as exposure, revealing the self. Perhaps one leaves not only phys-
ical traces within the pages of a book—a bookmark, a Post-it note—but also minutia such
as fingerprints, particles of skin, an eyelash, a crumb (Figure 4)?
To Sarah now. I skip the introduction, intending to read it another time, as I want to
start with her words, to know her first through her writing. I meet her on page 1, 10th
January 1862, in Baton Rouge: ‘A new year has opened up to me while my thoughts
are still wrapped up in the last; Heaven send it may be a happier one than 1861’
(1991, 5). The first entry is an account of the death of her brother Harry, who was five
years older than her, killed by Mr Sparks. The diary entry describes her mother’s stricken
face, the lead up to the news before finally being informed of his death and her grief—‘it
was my brother that was dead, the one I loved best of all’ (6). Her writing is compelling,
and I canter through the first entry, taking the nun’s prayer from its spot on page seven to
mark my place at the end of the first entry.
The next entry, 26th January 1862, tells of further grief and heartbreak:
Three months ago today, how hard it would have been to believe, if anyone had foretold
what my situation was to be in three short weeks from then! Even as late as the eighth of
November, what would have been my horror if I had known that in six days more, father
would be laid by Harry’s side! (11)

She writes an account of her father’s asthma attack, period of illness and then death,
noting: ‘All that made our home happy, or secured it to us, was gone. A sad life lay
before us’ (22). She writes of comforting her other brother: ‘I felt marble again and
could pity and soothe him as though he were the weak woman, I the strong man.
Where did I get that strength?’ (ibid.).
I have found my first weeks with these ten diaries fascinating. I look forward to return-
ing to each of them, reading more, going deeper. Next week I am also going to focus on
writing about diaries, that is, critical essays and academic articles, to see what this offers
in terms of the connections between women’s diary-writing practice and feminist theory.

15th May
I begin with ‘Body Work: Diarising Self-Display and Risk’ by Babs Boter (2022), the focus
of which is the diaries of the Dutch journalist Mary Pos (1904–1987). The article uses the
concept of ‘body work’10 in relation to Mary’s diaries and also analyses how she docu-
mented her body’s labour, which included the writing of them. Mary wrote: ‘I still do
not know exactly what good is the purpose of my diary writing. Especially that shorthand
writing, which you can barely reread, but I am unable to stop it’ (9th September 1932).
Diary writing as compulsion.
Babs makes some key points about the act of reading diaries, and the sense of intimacy
this affords the reader:
16 L. BISSELL

Figure 4. Nun’s prayer found within Sarah Morgan’s The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman.

[P]ersonal memories and associations, sensuous impressions, and our imagination and
bodily proximity may interact in the process of reading manuscript diaries. The intimate
reader, thus, needs to be particularly self-reflexive and critical of their reading position
and analysis. (2022, 196)

She also discusses the work of Suzanne Bunkers, in the 1980s one of the first scholars to
theorise the diary reader’s interaction with their source and to question the integrity of
 LIFE WRITING 17

reading a young woman’s personal diary (ibid.). Babs adds further ethical and methodo-
logical questions to this list, including those of ‘post-mortem privacy’ (Edwards and Har-
binja 2013), many of which have been on my mind since undertaking this project: ‘What
exactly are my academic and political/feminist responsibilities regarding the study of
these texts? How can I make sure that the diarist’s own historical moment will not
conflate with my own? (Boter 2022, 196).
Babs also discusses how she aimed to heighten and understand the experience of the
diarist when accessing the diaries of Mary, by connecting with her through other senses,
purposely conflating the historical sensory experience with her own whilst reading. For
example, she purchased the eau-de-cologne worn by both her grandmother and Mary
and placed passport photos and images of the diarist alongside the written text. The
written word can only communicate so much.

16th May
I must confess (for what are diaries but places for confessions?) that I have been reading
diaries outwith the structure of this project I had designed (Monday to Friday during
working hours). Namely one, Virginia’s A Writer’s Diary. As I mentioned previously,
this is the only text that I have on my Kindle and therefore am able to read while I sit
in the dark of my daughter’s room while she falls asleep. Virginia’s words have been
with me in the evenings, captivating me and drawing me in with their wit, relevance
and relatability. She writes of being forty—I am forty! She writes of her anguish about
her writing, the oscillation between her joy and confidence, her fear that her work is
not good and subsequent depressions. I hear her voice, and I empathise. I relate to
her, to her writing, her anxieties. I recognise the books she agonises over—I have read
them.
This morning I read ‘That Profoundly Female, and Feminist Genre: The Diary as Fem-
inist Practice’ by Cynthia Huff (1989), which cites Virginia frequently. The title of the
article refers to Adrienne Rich’s definition of the journal as ‘that profoundly female,
and feminist, genre’ (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, 1979, 217). Cynthia argues, convin-
cingly, that feminism as literary and social practice has connections with the diary
form, through their mutual sense of questioning and ‘by making connections and estab-
lishing community and communications among previously separated parts of experi-
ence’ (1989, 6). She argues:
Like feminist criticism, the diary, in its diversity of approach and focus, its melding of
various disciplines, its tendency to mesh the inner with the outer, has been accused of loos-
eness and a lack of rigor, the very antithesis of much canonical literature and literary criti-
cism. (1989, 6)

Cynthia says: ‘it is precisely the subversiveness of this trying-on and living-through of
various modes of experience, professional as well as personal, mental as well as physical,
that feminist critics have celebrated and that diaries have epitomized’ (1989, 7).
Arguing that the form of the diary can capture reflections on anything, Cynthia claims
that, ‘[t]he diary is an emblem of feminist practice’ and the ‘seeming artlessness’ of it
results in ‘unexpected bull’s-eyes’ (8). While diaries have often been referred to as
women’s traditional literature, Cynthia points out that this is ‘presumably traditional
18 L. BISSELL

because they were the only form women were allowed to practice’ (1989, 9–10). She ends
her article with the statement that: ‘Diaries connect and provide a symbol for us of the
mystery of our silenced, buried lives. “That profoundly female, and feminist, genre,”
the diary stands for the renaissance in our revision’ (12).

17th May
Today has been busy, I have had a headache all day, and my meetings and other work
commitments mean that I don’t get to read an article till the end of the day. It is an edi-
torial from the Life Writing journal of last year called ‘“Dear Diary, Dear Body”: Reading
Embodied and Narrated Selves’ (Boter et al. 2022, 160). I recognise Babs as one of the
authors and am beginning to gain a sense of who is writing and working in this field.
It opens with the statement: ‘Diaries, of course, are about bodies’ (159). The authors
contest the idea of diary writing as being about ‘disembodied people’s thoughts and
ideas’ (ibid.), contextualised as part of a Western hierarchy of mind over body, and
point out that, according to Kathleen Canning (1999), often ‘bodies are not made
visible at all’ in historical investigation (Boter et al. 2022, 160).
The authors’ aim is to examine a selection of diaries, asking the question ‘where is the
body?’ (162). Yesterday I was thinking about how diary writing was a form used by
women who had less right or legitimacy to be considered an author in the conventional
sense. As the suffragettes claimed, the personal is the political, and by valuing their own
narratives, women diarists were able to be ‘symbols’ of selfhood for future generations.
My head hurts, my body makes itself known. I write it in this diary. Then I stop
(Figure 5).

18th May
Inspired by yesterday’s thoughts on genre, today I turn to Valerie Raoul’s ‘Women and
Diaries: Gender and Genre’, which was published in 1989. Valerie immediately draws
attention to the problematic nature of allocating the definition of ‘masculine’ or ‘femi-
nine’ to a form, and I would argue that this is even more contestable today with the
expansion of understandings of gender. She writes:
There is, however, another type of text in which a woman may write about and for herself, if
not necessarily for other women. The ‘journal intime’ in the French tradition may be more
demonstrably ‘feminine’ in various ways than the novel. (1989, 57)

Valerie states that, unlike other types of journal that intend to chronicle a particular
moment and imagine an audience of contemporaries or are written for posterity, the
journal intime is a diary primarily written for the self. This is what most of the diaries
I have been reading imply, that the words are for the writer, not an imagined future
reader. Having said this, there is a consciousness in the diaries of Anaïs and Virginia
that suggests there could be a further audience for them, and Harriet wrote her story
with the express purpose of raising awareness of Black female slaves during the Civil
War. Valerie discusses how diaries and letters have traditionally been excluded from
what is deemed the literary canon on the basis of their privacy. As public appetite for
posthumously published private documents grew, so too did the fictional diary or
 LIFE WRITING 19

Figure 5. My diary.

pseudo-diary or the writing of diaries intended for publication written by male authors.
Valerie writes: ‘The original non-public, non-literary nature of the “genuine” diary is the
first feature which made it a form of writing considered appropriate for women’ (58). She
also argues that girls were encouraged to keep a diary only during the period of transi-
tioning from the status of child to wife: ‘Once married, writing about themselves was
20 L. BISSELL

perceived as an unjustifiable self-indulgence, a theft of time which should be more profi-

tably spent on others’ (ibid.).
Valerie writes:
A diary can be kept regularly or irregularly, over a long or short period; the length and
subject matter of its entries are variable; there are no rules to follow apart from the non-ret-
rospective one of being in médias res. It is an activity that can be fitted (though not always
without difficulty) into the odd spare moment, or made room for at the end of a tiring day.
Any event or non-event may be considered worthy of comment. Subjects usually considered
too trivial for inclusion in ‘a book’ are the mainstay of diaries, which frequently focus on the
domestic scene. (61)

I learn that Anaïs kept her diaries in a bank vault, so great was their value to her
(or perhaps, according to Valerie, because she faced economic instability when her
father, a banker, left). Valerie ends with a series of questions provoked by her reading
of Harriet Blodgett’s work on diaries written by English women before the First World
War:
What role do national and class factors play in determining how a woman writes about and
for herself? To what extent do these journals confirm or disprove theories of a distinct
female ethic? Do women relate the personal to the political (or divorce the two) in ways
different from men? Does diary keeping provide effective therapy in the face of women’s
alienation, provoked by the recognition of essential otherness? Or do these journals illus-
trate the ways in which the construction/constriction of Self through language remain pro-
blematic for women in particular?’ (63)

The questions posed by the articles I have been reading this week around gender and
genre, writing the self, and posthumous publication and audience resonant with my
own enquiries. I am haunted by Babs’ questions about my own implicit connections
and biases within the works I am reading, which are inevitably influenced by my own
autobiography, my life as a reader and a writer.

19th May
It is my sixth wedding anniversary tomorrow. I won’t write tomorrow as it is Saturday
and, today, I have a full day ahead of article corrections and finalising my book proposal
to send out for review. But first, diaries. This morning I read Morgan Jerkins ‘Black
Women Writers and the Secret Space of Diaries’, published in the New York Times in
2016. When sourcing women’s diaries, it was notable how many of the published journals
were written by white, middle-class women, many of whom were already writers and
therefore had an existing audience for their work. While women have been excluded
from the literary canon, and the form of diary-writing has been deemed unliterary (as
discussed by Valerie in the article I read yesterday), sourcing the diaries of Black
women has been even more challenging due to the multiple elements of exclusion,
oppression, and hardship that they were subjected to.
Morgan writes about Helen Oyeyemi’s story, ‘if a book is locked there’s probably a
good reason for that don’t you think’ (Oyeyemi cited in Jerkins 2016).11 The title is low-
ercase, and there is no question mark, perhaps to signal to the reader that the remark in
the title is not looking for a response. The narrator introduces the protagonist, Eva, who
is Black. At the data-analysis company where Eva works, her reticence draws in her co-
 LIFE WRITING 21

workers (whose races the reader never learns) who then steal her diary. Morgan writes:
‘we see how precarious that can be: with her locked diary, Eva protects herself from being
pried open and objectified; her co-workers, by plotting to steal her diary, threaten her
mind, a more insidious tactic than trying to subjugate her body’ (2016). She goes on
to argue that, for Black women, ‘their diaries are the only places where these women
can simply be—where they can hold onto safety for a little while longer, in order to
face the world anew, again, some other time’ (Jerkins 2016).
Morgan mentions the diaries of activist Ida B. Wells, published in 1995, and I go online
to order The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells to add to my collection. I am annoyed at myself
for not finding this diary previously, but also remind myself that this is what research is,
finding out things along the way, adapting, deepening, expanding. I look forward to
reading Ida’s work and am glad that this article about secrecy has revealed another
avenue for my exploration. Morgan ends with her own reflection: ‘For a Black woman
in a white world, a conversation with the self is crucial … When that world insists on
racist and narrow paradigms, the diary gives these women a chance to scratch out and
rewrite such definitions. That is what my own diary offers me’.

22nd May
I have been reading Virginia again, compelled by some of her writings on writing. There
are too many moments I wish to write down, multiple senses of overlap with other read-
ings, with Olivia Laing’s work, with Sara Ahmed, with ideas of water, submersion,
immersion.
I remember Babs’ urge to buy the cologne worn by Mary Pos in an attempt to evoke
some of the same sensory experiences as her diarist. This week I decide to do the same.
Abandoning any sense of objectivity, I seek out sensory links with these women, evoking
other physical sensations that they describe as I hear their voices in my ear, through the
words on my page. I aim to notice smells, sights, tastes in my readings this week and also
to try to think about how often the body is the medium for experiences of life, love, the
world.

23rd May
Embracing my own identity in this project, I am complicit in seeking out dates that I
know and that are meaningful to me. As a child I was gifted a book about the year of
my birth, 1983, and I eagerly turned to the page with my birthday on it to find out
what had happened on that day.12 I find myself obsessing over dates in the diaries I
am reading, noticing entries that are memorable to me. My wedding anniversary, my
parents’ wedding anniversary, my sister’s birthday, the date my daughter was born. I
seek significance in these dates for the diarist, searching for clues, links between my
life and theirs, that have not been revealed before now. I realise that I do this because
I am trying to write our lives together in some way, to find affinities with these
women who wrote their stories before me. Is this disingenuous or is this what we do
when we read anything, in any form of literature? Empathy, recognition, connection.
Some of our experiences are similar, they bind us together in a way, and I seek out the
stories of others through which I see my own, my mother’s, my sister’s, my daughter’s.
22 L. BISSELL

24th May
Virginia says:
The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman … it is only when we can
measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woman
that we can account for the success or failure of the ordinary woman as writer. (1976, 142)

I think of Harriet, snatching moments of time between her duties as a slave. I imagine
Anne, in her attic, as the bombs rain down outside, and Zlata, sheltering with her
family, in the husk of their city. I think of how diaries have been deemed unworthy of
inclusion in the literary canon, not considered art due to their lack of refinement, of con-
sideration of audience. Women were excluded from the canon anyway until some
women writers were able to write themselves in, many using pseudonyms so as not to
put off male readers.13 Diary writing as enacting change.

25th May
On the last day of keeping my diary diary, I turn to my late addition, The Memphis
Diary of Ida B. Wells. The foreword by Mary Helen Washington opens with the state-
ment: ‘Every woman who has ever kept a diary knows that women write in diaries
because things are not going right’ (1995, ix). Ida was orphaned in 1878 at 16
years of age and had to leave school and give up her dream of becoming a teacher
in order to care for her five younger siblings. She started her diary aged 24, before
her career as ‘a dynamic journalist and a one-woman crusade against lynching’
(ibid.) took off. Washington writes that, as a highly gifted and talented woman, Ida
is ‘in constant conflict with conventional female roles, which undermine and restrict
a woman’s desire for work and achievement’ (x). This sums up much of what I have
found across several of the diaries, that societal expectations of and conventions
around what women’s role should be, common to a range of historical contexts, is
often in conflict with the individual’s desire for self-development, creativity and a
meaningful life. Setting up a methodological approach to reading diaries and
writing my diary diary has allowed for recognising some affinities between women
diarists, but these parameters have also inevitably functioned as limits and I would
have liked to have provided a deeper reading of each. This dipping in and out of
the women’s lives (already condensed through editing and publication) has provided
a surface reading of their diaries. I would like to continue this work over a longer
timeframe, piecing together my thoughts on diary writing as an ongoing feminist
project, spending more time with each of these fragments and seeking diaries from
other cultural contexts. As I have learned this month, diaries were vital not only
for developing a response to the question asked by Adrienne Rich: ‘But what was it
like for women?’ (1976, 16)—how they lived, thought, and perceived their own lives
within the context of their own period in history—but also for women to write them-
selves into being. In reading these diaries together, and writing myself in, I draw
attention to the ongoing feminist project of doing both what Elkin claims and its
opposite—writing the self for the self—but also become part of a lineage of
women’s lived experiences made visible to a wider audience.
 LIFE WRITING 23

Diaries referenced
Anonymous. 1973. The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan
(954–974). Trans. Edward Seidensticker. Toyko and Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle
Company Publishers.
Zlata Filipović. 2006. Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Wartime Sarajevo (1991–1993).
London: Penguin Books.
Anne Frank. 1995. The Diary of Anne Frank (1942). Introduction by Rabbi Hugo Gryn.
London: Macmillan Children’s Books.
Harriet Ann Jacobs. 2001. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). New York: Dover
Publications Inc.
Sarah Morgan. 1991. The Civil War Diary of A Southern Woman (1862). Ed. Charles East.
Georgia: University of Georgia Press.
Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries of Iris Murdoch (1939–45). Ed. Peter J.
Conradi. London: Short Books.
Anaïs Nin. 1978. The Journals of Anaïs Nin (1931–34). Introduction by Gunther
Stuhlmann. London: Quartet.
Sylvia Plath. 2000. The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1950–1962). Ed. Karen V. Kukil. London:
Faber and Faber.
Susan Sontag. 2008. Reborn: Journals and Notebooks (1947–1963). Ed. David Reiff.
New York: Picador.
Ida B. Wells. 1995. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1885–88). Ed. Miriam DeCosta-
Willis. New York: Penguin Random House.
Virginia Woolf. 2017. A Writer’s Diary (1918–41). Musaicum Books.

Notes
1. Before submission I did edit material for brevity to ensure it was within the word count. I
also added references and footnotes—while writing the diary I wrote REF as a placeholder to
avoid breaking up the flow of diary writing.
2. This is a nod to feminist lineages of listing women by their first names (Šimić and
Underwood-Lee 2021) and also feels appropriate due to the intimate form of the diary.
3. ‘A distinction must be drawn in this respect between autobiography and the ‘journal intime’.
Autobiography is a life-story, addressed to an audience, whether it be the author’s own chil-
dren or the general public. It is frequently a form of self-justification, apology or example (to
follow or avoid), with rhetorical ends dependent on its reception by an audience. The private
diary, in contrast, is, initially at least, destined to be read only by its author. The ‘“intimiste”
performs a triple self-projection, performing more-or-less simultaneously all three func-
tions: author, character and reader of the text’ (Raoul 1989, 60).
4. There are examples of diaries in other mediums, for example the Radio diaries of people in
Malawi telling their stories of having HIV.
5. 1st May is Workers’ Day commemorating historic struggles and gains made by workers and
labour movements.
6. Vita and Virginia were close—and had a romantic relationship—their more than 500 love
letters spanning 20 years plus are published by Cleis Press (2001).
7. As described, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1938–46 is made up of letters to two men,
the poet Frank Thompson, who was murdered in Belgravia in 1944, and David Hicks, a
teacher in Cairo, curated alongside Iris’ journals written when she was a touring actress
in 1939.
24 L. BISSELL

8. The Magpie Journal is a 100-page account of an Oxford University theatre company’s tour
of the Cotswolds, including a free matinee for Basque children who were displaced as a
result of the Spanish civil war.
9. This volume is made up of four books.
10. ‘Body work’ is defined by Julia Coffey as: ‘a series of affective relations between the body and
its environment; and as an embodied practice’ (2012, 97).
11. This story features in Helen Oyeyemi’s collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (2015).
12. The year in which Roland Rat first appeared on television and ‘Billie Jean’ by Michael
Jackson was number one in the UK music charts.
13. Discussed by Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own (1977).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Dr Laura Bissell is an Athenaeum Research Fellow and Lecturer in Contemporary Performance
Practice at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where she also co-chairs the Sustainability Com-
mittee. She co-edited and authored three books in 2021: Performance in a Pandemic, with Dr Lucy
Weir (Routledge, 2021), Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010–2020 (Triarchy, 2021), and
Bubbles: Reflections on Becoming Mother (Luath, 2021). Laura was a visiting lecturer on the MRes
in Creative Practices programme at Glasgow School of Art from 2012–18 and has taught at the
Transart Institute MFA in Berlin. She has a PhD (‘The Female Body, Technology and Perform-
ance: Performing a Feminist Praxis’, University of Glasgow), an MPhil by Research (‘The Posthu-
man Body in Performance’, University of Glasgow), and a first-class MA (Hons) degree in English
Literature and Theatre Studies (University of Glasgow). Laura has a Postgraduate Certificate in
Higher Arts Education and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research
interests include contemporary performance practices; autobiographical writing; technology; fem-
inist performance; ecology; interdisciplinarity; journeys and matrescence. She has presented her
research at conferences nationally and internationally. Laura is currently External Examiner for
the MA in Contemporary Performance Practice at the University of Salford and has previously
been External Examiner for European Theatre Arts at Rose Bruford College. Laura has had her
poetry, creative writing and academic writing published in journals and anthologies.

ORCID
Laura Bissell http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6959-0545

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