Women’s anger and frustration could only find an outlet in their diaries
SECRET VOICES A year of women’s diaries
SARAH GRISTWOOD, EDITOR 528pp. Batsford. £25.
ON JANUARY 20, 1919, Virginia Woolf made a note to self in her now celebrated journal: “this diary writing does not count as writing”. She’d reread it and wanted to acknowledge its deficiencies, especially “the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along”. But – to judge from the selection offered in Secret Voices: A year of women’s diaries – Woolf ’s self-wounding often carries its own salve. By the end of the paragraph she has already changed her mind, deciding that the method has benefits: “Sweeping up matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds in the dustheap”.
Consistency is not required of a diarist; indeed, freedom to contradict yourself without seeming a bore or a maniac is one of the things that distinguishes it from letter-writing. As for whether diarykeeping is or is not writing, I can only say that printing it in a book like this makes it so, and prompts us to consider whose diary is enjoyable for the reader, regardless of the author’s intentions for it. A really striking feature is the collapse of quality in the last quarter of the twentieth century. There are good reasons for this. One of them is a comparative scarcity of material: many diarists of that time are, presumably, still writing them.
But the real culprit, I would contend, arises from what the editor of Secret Voices, Sarah Gristwood, concludes in her preface: that the “strongest emotions voiced through all these diary entries ... would be anger – frustration. And that is something that our cultural norms have allowed women to voice only secretly”. This is no longer the case. Not that women aren’t frustrated – that seems to be going well for us still. No, the difference is that the diary has lost its eminence as the sole point of ventilation for those feelings. Women’s diary-writing flourished at times when their rage against social conditions was, like homosexuality in post-revolutionary France, a secret but not a crime. I doubt there are many women’s diaries lying around in theocratic states, full of specific instances of patriarchal injustice and double standards.
Likewise the earliest diary here, and indeed the earliest diary written in English by a woman, that of Lady Hoby (b.1571), comes from the time when language of complaint hadn’t divorced from that of prayer. The diary is itself a sort of tomb, a sealed sarcophagus of thoughts inexpressible outside her own mind.
3 February, 1599: After private prayers I did eat my breakfast; and then dressed the sores that I had undertaken; after I went to Church; after I prayed privately and dined: in the afternoon I went again to chu
