Diary Criticism
Authors: North Polly 
Published: February 2025

This article is a review of lay and academic interest in the diary-form between 1800 and 2022, with a focus on the form’s treatment as an academic resource post-1970. Much of the article’s work points to further areas of study. Across millennia and in many cultures a lively array of concepts, practices and mediums make up numerous diary-forms—matched by a myriad of lay and academic disciplines and approaches to their discussion. The diary, as life-writing’s most rebellious and indistinct scion, is impossible to confine to one discipline classification. Many diaries are an excellent transdisciplinary and pluriversal heuristic device. Deliberately Introspective diaries, in particular, read across to many of the issues which are embattled and perplexing in the wider humanities and sciences, and in our personal lives too. Diary-writing has been used to grapple with ideas around authenticity, voice, and agency: these are amenable to scientific, philosophical, psychological and literary discussion. While some diarists have set the highest standards in self-examination, often in aid of shaping their lived experience, or seeking agency (Aurelius, Wittgenstein, and Sontag among others), many diarists’ efforts at authenticity are performative, deluded, or deceitful. Usefully, the form’s special nature, including its “poetics” and modus operandi, points to interpretative processes that are well-suited to navigating such elusive territory; it does so precisely because the form will not be standardized. Diarists, including Charlotte Forten, Albert Einstein, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Susan Sontag exemplify the ways in which the form’s openness to messiness allow us to approach our essential mysteries (or, the unknowns we deal with on a daily basis) even when we can’t quite express them. Diary-writing does not solve the essential mystery of agency or authenticity—but it can act as a Ground Zero for their examination. Serious appreciation of and interest in the study of diaries is widely considered to have gained ground only from the 1970s onward, before which they had been part of supposedly “uncharted outlands,” “Current Bibliography on Life-Writing” (Wachter 1987, cited under Archiving the Diary and the Diary in Academia, Post-1970) and were considered “marginal,” as suggested by the title Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History (Langford and West 1999, cited under the Diary and Academia, Pre-1970); or “unwholesome, hypocritical, cowardly, worthless, artificial, sterile, shrivelling, feminine,” On Diary (Lejeune 2009, cited under the Diary and Academica, Pre-1970). However, 19th- and early20th-century European academics and critics interested in diaries came from multiple disciplines and read diaries for many reasons: sometimes for their literary or intellectual merit, but more often than not for the insights they afforded the sociologist, historian, biographer, or literary critic as they researched an aspect of social history or of a person’s life. The Bunting Collection, at the Great Diary Project archive, London, indicates that academic interest in the diary-form was as much a matter of the nineteenth century as it was of the late twentieth. The collection shows that during the nineteenth century numerous prototype diary-academics catalogued, listed, studied, theorized, and reproduced diaries (written between 1600 and the 1800s) in bibliographies, books, and in journals created by “learned societies and printing clubs and literary associations” (as listed in English Catalogue of Books 1835–1863). Their work was often accompanied with extensive commentary on the diary. Rachel Steinitz and David Amigoni’s work on 19th-century diary-commentary and the recent work of Joanne Shattock, Joanne Wilkes, Katherine Newey, and Valerie Sanders, in Literary and Cultural Criticism from the Nineteenth Century, goes some way to fleshing out our understandings of the diary’s critical reception in the nineteenth century. Researchers at Reading University and The Great Diary Project are aiming to add to this history of diary-criticism over the next three years. It is fairly well-known that early-20th-century scholars, such as Georg Misch and Arthur Ponsonby , found that diary-like texts, from as early as 450 bce, were a good measure of the development and history of mind, or the idea of a “self.” Criticism, terms, and approaches evolve but the desire to pick over the nature and content of human experience remains a constant. If one spends any time at all reading diary criticism post-1970, one soon finds oneself on the front lines of a culture war, that between the pragmatic, humanist tradition and ideas that are more akin to the postmodern or structuralist challenge. Often, the essence of it all is: do we own our capital V “voice,” or are we cyphers and proxies for society and our material make-up? In this way, diary-writing leads us to examine the foundations of vital human frameworks, including those that make up our personal, moral, and physical lives. But it does so with a keen eye for life’s variety and ambiguity of life’s experiences and explanations. Two points on the scope of this bibliographic article. Firstly, the terms “diary” and “journal” are often used interchangeably, especially in North America and France. This article focuses on primary and secondary texts that use the term “diary.” The memoir, compilations of private letters, and autobiography (even biography) are also closely linked to the diary. This family of forms, including diary, have been dubbed life-writing or ego-documents. The commonality is that journals, memoirs, etc. usually express a perspective on events the authors were part of or observed. These forms diverge from the diary—especially its spontaneous and extempore form—in that they are usually carefully considered and retrospective; they are often written with hindsight; tackle longer periods of time; and/or have a predesignated focus. Secondly, autobiography has traditionally been accorded higher levels of academic respect than the diary and there is a wider availability of materials on this life-writing form. This article will touch on issues relating to autobiography when they are pertinent to the diary.