Diary Criticism

by

Polly North

• LAST MODIFIED: 19 February 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0193

Introduction

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.

The Diary as Historical Artifact 1800–

Starting in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, British societies and journals (including Sussex Archaeological Collections, The Gentlemen’s Magazine, Records of Buckinghamshire, and The Antiquary) published abridged or entire diaries by the everyman and woman. These diaries were distributed as curios or as an extension of the archaeological, historical, and geographical record and were often considered as examples of social and psychical developments. Diaries were, in this context, cited as firsthand and popular testimony to a particular period, event, location, or profession. Early interest in diaries by non-famous people was not limited to this context; for example, there were those which were read for pleasure and as a learning opportunity. The 19th-century’s pioneering forages into reading diaries as historical and social resource informed the work of 20th-century social research groups. Such groups included the Mass-Observation Social Research Organisation (started in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings) and The History Workshop (started in 1966 by Raphael Samuel), both of which operate today. These projects were founded on an interest in safeguarding, celebrating, and exploring the experiences and lives of “ordinary” people (if there could ever be such a thing). Twentietch-century attention to diaries by the everyman and woman introduced a new and noteworthy political dimension. The historian and life-writing academic Penny Summerfield (Summerfield 1985) discusses how the Mass-Observation Social Research Organisation took historical-materialist or structuralist approaches to diary-writing and keenly attended to the diary-form’s potential for popular representation, counter narrative, and meta-narrative or meta-discourse. Taylor 2009, a biography of Chiang Kai-shek, raises issues about the suitability of diaries to historical research. This is an ongoing topic of discussion among diary-writing scholars, particularly among historical researchers who refer to diary-writing as a primary resource. Schoppa 2010 and Summerfield 2018 provide ample summaries of the issues pertaining to diary-as-history. Key issues are those of the diary narrative’s gappiness and of the diarist’s questionable ability to render a factually accurate account of the past; either of which can mitigate against a diary’s being accurately representative of a moment in time. (See the section the Diary-as-Fact for discussion of diaries and historical representativeness and epistemology.) Despite these issues, 21st-century scholars continue to find diaries unique and useful reference material for understanding significant historical events. Diaries have, for instance, provided insight into the multiple facets of the international and national conflicts fought between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. These could range from the domestic to the social and geopolitical. Diaries written during conflict add to and reframe the narratives of history books or contemporaneous media. For example, Winder 2015, whose author is a professor in Middle East studies, finds that diary-writing can account for aspects of civilian life during the Palestinian war of 1948; dimensions that would otherwise be missed from record. Cameron 2015, whose author is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, attests to the ways in which diaries have described places in the world that are not officially documented or are footnotes to the official record. Armstrong 2004, whose author is an editor and compiler of diaries, and Ransel 2004, whose author is a historian with an interest in life-writing, show how diaries have given voice to the experiences of historically under-represented people (for example, midwives, foot soldiers, provincial merchants, and house maids). Huff 2008 focuses on women’s literature and in the use of life-writing texts as a pedagogical resource. The author describes how diaries can sometimes be documents that speak for a wider range of people than usually appear in the historical record. They can be a means of exploring the ways cultural and collective memories are constructed. Ransel 2004 argues that diaries are a vital micro-history that can counter-balance political and social macro-histories: “If a diary facilitates close study of community, it can be used to test the macro-historical observations that inform the grand narrative. By radically reducing the scale of observation, it is possible to see social dynamics that not only do not appear in the larger picture but that may even be incommensurable with it” (p. 600). This description implies that diaries can act against what the structuralist Jean-Francois Lyotard, in Lyotard 1984, characterized as “grand narratives.” Gracia 2008 and Hewitson 2017 discuss the significance of life-writing to historical revisionism. That is, the view that diaries and the micro-narratives they contain can challenge often dominant and widely accepted historical macro-narratives, or grand-narratives. It is in this guise that micro-narratives can also be known as counter-narratives. (See the Diary and Agency for discussion of critical approaches to agency and diary-writing.) Approaches to the diary that have a keen historical agenda sometimes have a tendency to relegate the form to the status of auxiliary (often unreliable) primary historical research tool, or as subordinate bystander to an age, body of work, or a person. Obviously, diaries such as Samuel Pepys’s (b. 1633–d. 1703) and Anne Frank’s (b. 1929–d. 1945) have been widely read and applauded. The difference here is between a wide lay readership, which enjoys the highly personal in famous diaries as well as the historical, and the academics for whom the historical relevance of the literary artifact is more important.

• Armstrong, Mary. Seven Eggs Today: The Diaries of Mary Armstrong, 1859 and 1869. Edited by Jackson Webster Armstrong. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004.

  Armstrong presents the edited diaries of the wife of a farmer from north Toronto. The book contains an extensive introduction providing historical context for the diaries.

• Bloom, Lynn Z. “The Diary as Popular History.” Journal of Popular Culture 9.4 (1976): 794–807.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.0022-3840.1976.00794.x

  The representativeness, or the historical veracity, of diaries as historical counter-narratives is far from certain. With this uncertainty in mind, Bloom discusses the idea that diaries tell a previously untold story. Bloom points out that would-be writers who are forcibly silenced, or are silenced by illiteracy and a lack of materials, do not have the luxury of telling their stories.

• Cameron, Sarah. “The Diary of Maria Bruss as a Source on Soviet Kazakhstan.” Avtobiografija 4 (2015): 265–270.

  Cameron reviews the historical context for Maria Bruss’s diary and confirms its value as a rare surviving document by a woman living during the early years of Soviet Kazakhstan (1917–1945).

• Gracia, Jordi. “Revisionism, a Necessary Evil.” International Journal of Iberian Studies 21.3 (2008): 47–62.

  DOI: 10.1386/ijis.21.3.247_1

  Gracia writes that life-writing documents provide strong evidence for alternative historical narratives and, as such, strengthen the case for good revisionism.

• Hewitson, Mark. Absolute War: Violence and Mass Warfare in the German Lands, 1792–1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

  DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198787457.001.0001

  Hewitson compares and contrasts established accounts of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in German territory with reference to life-writing documents from 17921820.

• Huff, Cynthia. “Memory, Memorabilia, and Life-Narrative.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 23.1 (2008): 25–40.

  DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2008.10815194

  Huff illustrates how unpacking the cultural histories of private, culturally significant objects, such as diaries, can help reveal how cultures construct memories and acts of remembrance.

• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Foreword by F. Jameson. Translated by G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 1984.

  This is a background text for structuralist approaches to the diary. See introduction and chapter 1 for description of grand-narratives. Originally published in 1979.

• Ransel, David L. “The Diary of a Merchant: Insights into Eighteenth-Century Plebeian Life.” Russian Review 63.4 (2004): 594–608.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9434.2004.00334.x

  Ransel’s article provides a brief introduction to the diary-form’s historical development and its relevance to academia.

• Schoppa, Keith. “Diaries as a Historical Source: Goldmines and/or Slippery Slopes.” Chinese Historical Review 17.1 (2010): 31–36.

  DOI: 10.1179/tcr.2010.17.1.31

  Schoppa discusses how diaries and their micro-narratives can “speak for an entire historical period.” He explores the degree to which a micro-narrative or a macro-narrative can be an accurate representation of historical events.

• Summerfield, Penny. “Mass-Observation: Social Research or Social Movement?” Journal of Contemporary History 20.3 (1985): 439–452.

  DOI: 10.1177/002200948502000306

  Summerfield describes the development and ethos of the Mass-Observation Social Research Organisation.

• Summerfield, Penny. Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018.

  DOI: 10.4324/9780429487217

  A good introduction to the use of self-narratives (such as diaries, memoirs, letters, and oral histories) within the field of history. Describes scholarly debates pertaining to the representativeness and the historical reliability of the life-writing record.

• Taylor, Jay. The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

  DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvjghvb9

  Taylor quotes from Chiang Kai-shek’s diary 420 times, and he does so with well-described reservations about the use of diaries as historical resource and about diarists’ ability to provide factual accounts of historical events.

• Winder, Alex. “After the Nakba in Nuba: A Palestinian Villager’s Diary, 1949.” Biography 37.2 (2015): 398–450.

  Winder uses diary entries written after the 1948 war by a Palestinian villager from Hebron’s outlying areas to, “demonstrate the unique value of such a source for recovering individual Palestinian subjectivities in the aftermath of the Nakba, while also exploring the challenges that it presents, its resistance to dominant historical narratives and hegemonic understandings of diaries” (p. 398).