I must be a bit of a literary voyeur, because I love to read diaries. Only thing is, though, diaries written by literary figures, or famous people in general, can sometimes be suspect, as the writers likely have in the back of their minds the notion that their diary will someday be published and read, and so write accordingly. How honest can such diaries be, I find myself wondering. My favorite diaries are those written by unknown people whose writings have been published mainly because of the time in which they lived, be it a World War, or the Great Depression; or perhaps they were among the early pioneers, trying to forge an existence in a hitherto unexplored wilderness. Their seemingly ordinary lives are no less interesting than the lives of the famous; in fact, in many cases they can be even more interesting, because we can more readily identify with them.
One of my favorite diarists is a young woman called Emily Shore. The excerpts I read of her journal in The Faber Book of Diaries were so intriguing and moving, that I ordered the entire Journal of Emily Shore through Amazon. Emily was a young English woman who died in 1839 at the age of 19, from tuberculosis. She was brilliant, extraordinarily well-read and learned, curious of intellect, and only stopped studying and writing when her illness became so advanced that she could no longer hold a pen. Her zest for learning, her profound interest in the myriad miracles of nature, her purity of heart and thought, expressed so vividly in her writing, have all moved me so much that I find myself wishing I had known her and been her friend. As it is, my acquaintance with her through the written word is one of the greatest joys that reading has ever granted me.
Some years ago, I found a fascinating volume at Half-Price Books called Private Pages. Edited by Penelope Franklin, it is a compilation of long excerpts from diaries written by thirteen American women between the years 1832 to 1979. The youngest diarist was a 13-year-old school girl; the oldest was a Quaker woman in her seventies. In between are aspiring writers, housewives, and career women, none of them particularly well known except perhaps in their hometowns. Just as fascinating to me as the diary excerpts themselves, is the editor's search and collecting of them, which she recounts in her introduction. Imagine going from town to town, digging into archives and dusty library files, trying to decipher old-fashioned handwriting; having people approach you, once your mission has been made known, with their great-grandmother's diaries which have been stored in the attic for fifty years. It must have been an arduous task for Ms. Franklin, and I thank her for making it possible for me and many other readers to get to know these ordinary yet complex women.
I suppose I prefer reading women's diaries because I'm mostly interested in the interior landscape of a woman's life, the struggles and dilemmas common to our sex. I have no children, but I enjoy reading about the joys and trials of pregnancy and motherhood. Even though I've never had any difficulty in building my career, I enjoy reading about how our predecessors dealt with being a woman in a man's world, how they found and nurtured the resilience they needed to succeed in whatever career they chose to follow. I enjoy reading, though I'm single, about courtships and marriages. Maybe I want to experience by proxy things I have never experienced in reality. And along the way, I'm sure to meet women like Emily Shore and be forever grateful for their spirit, intellect, and heart.
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