Diaries
Authors: North Polly 
Published: January 2023

Diarists are drawn from all walks of life and are very various in their practices, languages, cultures, formats, gender identifications, sexual preferences, politics, and periods. Diaries are equally and literally various in their accessibility and readability: many are not published, others are destroyed, misplaced, or hidden, or so damaged, coded, or illegible they cannot be read. Diaries almost always bear the marks of their authors’ personalities: though akin, no diaries are quite alike. Each threatening to disprove a cherished rule. All united only by being so different from each other. The family of diary characteristics outlined here is offered as a guide, not a rule. Diary writing is, variously, regular, frequent, spontaneous, extempore, fragmentary, dated, frank, private, personal, and introspective; quite often diary writing is undertaken as an exercise (that is, for its own sake as a process). It is some permutation of these characteristics that often constitutes a diary, and any permutation is capable of having great quality. There will be reticence and eloquence across the board, from the future planning of a purpose-built appointment diary to the deliberate introspection of an extempore or retrospective diary. It is worth noting that two features of the diary form, and they are often seen as the quintessence of diary writing, are that its entries are personal and are ascribed a date or are serial. However, even these characteristics are no more definitive than they are the stand-out feature of all diarists. Firstly, we will take a brief look at the relevance of time to many diarists and diary formats. For millennia, dated commentaries have been found in annals, chronicles, almanacs, and other formal records. They were and are crucial documents, not least in allowing the flow of events, or their timeline, to be assessed. These formal time-concerned texts continued to fulfil their original purpose as records of state or other activity, not least by leaders and their officials. But gradually they also became documents in which personal notes were made in a dated format. The arrow of time takes on a peculiar significance in the diary. For example, the pages of a modern shop-bought diary are often date-marked. But a diary’s pages are filled with how time is subjectively experienced; emotions and the vicissitudes of memory will affect the ways in which objectively measured time is experienced and accounted for. The second characteristic of diary that we will remark on here, and its most quintessential, is that it will almost always be in a vital and fundamental sense personal. Even at their most quotidian, diaries reveal personal details relating to their writers. For example, the most perfunctory appointment diary reveals what its diarist wanted to remember. When we look into the heart of the personal, we often touch on profoundly important yet inveterately ambiguous ideas, including what it is to discern, verify, and describe the nature and content of our human experience. Diary writing is an excellent springboard into thinking about what it is to express and experience, to be conscious of, one’s public life and one’s personal inner life. Identity, subjectivity, responsibility, and agency all come under the microscope. To explore a diary is also to wonder about the ways in which we handle our epistemological and ontological constructs. Though this article is less about the content of diary criticism and more about the nature of diary writing, a brief word on the significance of the personal in diary writing will highlight how important this characteristic is to critics and diarists alike. Pre-1970, there were a small handful of European academics, such as Georg Misch (A History of Autobiography in Antiquity) and Arthur Ponsonby (English Diaries), who considered life writing, in particular autobiography and diary, worth studying. They had 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.” It is now the case that diary criticism from the early nineteenth century onward charts changing academic attitudes to the personal. Post 1970, academic recognition for diaries and their significance has been on an upward curve. 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, 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 this: 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 the variety and ambiguity of life’s experiences and explanations. Four points on the scope of this bibliographic article. Firstly, it is designed to support the general and academic reader of diaries. Though I hope it will be of interest to diarists, the article has not been written as a guide to how, where, when, and what to write in a diary. Secondly, 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. Thirdly, the article concentrates on the form’s development and reception as a historical and cultural practice, specific primary texts, and the location of primary texts. Sections of the article, including Reference Works and Academic Journals, are a sound introduction to the form, as an academic subject. Finally, 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. The article will touch on issues relating to autobiography when they are pertinent to the diary.