Agony and adventure: the hidden histories inside women's diaries

The end of the Second World War in Europe, and the way it was celebrated, is widely documented. But Nella Last’s vivid description shows what a gift we have in women’s diaries: their immediacy, their sense of what it was like being there, and their insight into what the diarist was thinking, rather than what the weight of hindsight would tell them to do. Yet, despite their intrinsic value to historians, women’s diaries remain a largely untapped resource – something that motivated me to compile a new anthology, Secret Voices, bringing together more than 1,200 diary entries written by women all over the world.

Diaries: a fresh perspective on history

Indeed, diary entries written on the same day as major events can put what we’ve traditionally thought of as being ‘history’ into perspective. As Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman living in Amsterdam, wrote in February 1942: “It is now half-past seven in the morning. I have clipped my toenails, drunk a mug of genuine Van Houtens cocoa, and had some bread and honey.” She described feeling, at that moment, “enormous faith and gratitude that life should be so beautiful”, despite the fact that she had to report to the Gestapo that same day, and would die in Auschwitz the following year.

It risks stereotype to suggest female diarists are more attuned to the immediacy of daily life than their male counterparts. The pragmatism of Nella Last’s pears – the ridiculous, rather than the sublime – has many an echo in the diary of Samuel Pepys.

Perhaps it is risky even to suggest that women are more willing to be frank about their failure to see the wider perspective. “Oh, what a wretch I am! If I haven’t forgotten to put in the grand news!! SEBASTOPOL HAS FALLEN!” wrote the educational reformer Lucy Cavendish upon hearing of the Allies’ victory during the Crimean War in 1855. More than 60 years later, in 1918, the novelist Virginia Woolf noted wryly that there were three facts on her mind: talk of peace, a visit to London’s 1917 Club and the breaking of her spectacles, though the first was, after all, “the most important of the three”.

An overlooked resource

A few women’s diaries have been widely studied: Nella Last’s journals were adapted into the 2006 ITV drama Housewife, 49; Etty Hillesum’s contemporary, Anne Frank, is a household name; and Virginia Woolf is one of many professional writers noted as much for her life-writing as for her other forms of literature.

• Read more | Censoring Anne Frank: how her famous diary has been edited through history

But overall, we are still playing catch-up, and women’s diaries are still largely ignored in comparison to those of their male counterparts. Indeed, women make up less than a third of the contributors to one of the most popular anthologies of diaries, and less than a fifth in another readily available volume – all this despite the fact the private, unassuming nature of the form has traditionally been viewed as being particularly suited to women.

This past lack of study is now being corrected to a significant degree, but much of the astonishing material in female diaries remains overlooked. When we begin exploring such sources, however, we find that our view of women in the past becomes both more vivid and more nuanced.

Women from different walks of life

Women’s diaries offer extraordinary stories, reflecting many different walks of life. Ada Blackjack, an Indigenous Alaskan woman recruited to take part in a 1921 expedition to Wrangel Island, off Siberia, describes her experiences as its sole survivor. Regency governess Ellen Weeton laments being thrown onto the street by her husband and denied access to their daughter. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of aviator Charles Lindbergh, records her agony following the kidnap and murder of her baby son.

Other diaries are given extraordinary poignancy by the hindsight of history – particularly those written during times of conflict. The First World War diarist Vera Brittain, for example, describes feeling elated as she prepares to meet her fiancé coming home from the front in 1915, only to be stopped by a telegram announcing his death.

A few women have seen their diaries entering the public domain by virtue of their political position. Lady Bird Johnson, wife of Lyndon B Johnson, writes of seeing John F Kennedy’s presidential cavalcade driving into Dallas on 22 November 1963, and how she first thought that the sounds of gunshots were firecrackers being let off by the crowd. A few years later, she introduced a published version of her diaries by stating that – after unexpectedly becoming America’s first lady – she stood in a unique position and wanted to “preserve [history] as it happened”.

Although Lady Bird’s notability came while serving in a conventional female role – that of a wife – some diarists have achieved political prominence in their own right. The Labour MPs Barbara Castle and Oona King, for instance, both had their diaries published shortly after leaving frontline politics.

Others again have found their potential developing within the traditional female role of a nurturer or caregiver. In fact, there could be a whole book containing nurses’ diary entries alone, such as those of Cynthia Asquith, who discovered that she could achieve so much more as a First World War nursing volunteer than as a socialite.

Being frank about physicality

Historical diaries can be surprising for all sorts of reasons, but sometimes their surprise lies in their sense of familiarity today. At the dawn of the 19th century, the Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry wrote about the difficulties of trying to balance her work with her family life, as well as her struggles to bond with her newborn baby.

On other occasions, their surprise – or perhaps their shock – instead lies in the merciful unfamiliarity of experiences that must have loomed in the minds of many. I once remember reading novelist Fanny Burney’s 1811 account of undergoing a mastectomy without anaesthetic, and wondering whether I could get out of the library without throwing up on the floor.

The privacy of diaries has enabled women to speak with a frankness we do not find in other sources – about, for example, their own physicality. In one entry, Virginia Woolf mentions having been unable to write for what she describes as the “usual reasons”, but which had since “duly delivered themselves” – a reference, one presumes, to her menstrual cycle. Similarly, the 18th-century diarist Hester Thrale Piozzi describes her experiences of going through the menopause, calling it the “Second Critical change” in her life after the menarche: “I believe my oldest Friend is at last going to leave me… nor do I, nor did I then feel any other very material Alteration from the coming or going of Youth.”

I once remember reading novelist Fanny Burney’s 1811 account of undergoing a mastectomy without anaesthetic, and wondering whether I could get out of the library without throwing up on the floor

A 14-year-old Anne Frank writes about her body with even more openness: “Each time I have a period – and that has only been three times – I have a feeling that in spite of all the pain, unpleasantness, and nastiness, I have a sweet secret, and that is why, although it is nothing but a nuisance to me in a way, I always long for the time that I shall feel that secret within me again.”

Such accounts serve to remind us that although the records of women from the past regularly dwell on their physicality – from the assaults of witch-hunters to discussions of a queen’s beauty or fertility – women’s views about their own bodies have often been written out of history.

A place for feelings and secrets

Women have used diaries for other forms of release, too. Sometimes they have been a place to express feelings – anger, resentment, frustrated ambition – that would have been considered unacceptable in the author’s day. Both the landowner Anne Lister (recently the subject of the BBC drama Gentleman Jack) and author Beatrix Potter wrote their diaries in code. But while Lister’s lesbianism was an obvious reason for secrecy, Potter’s youthful despair – before the success of her books gave her a measure of independence – was likewise a transgression in its own way.

A disproportionate number of women’s diaries have been written at a time of distress: the scientist Marie Curie is just one woman who briefly found relief in her journal after the death of her husband, Pierre. Meanwhile, the shock that author Mary Shelley experienced following the death of her premature daughter is evident, given the brevity of the entries: “Find my baby dead... a miserable day – in the evening read Fall of the Jesuits.”

• Read more | Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: the birth of a gothic monster

A number of youthful diaries end on marriage, or motherhood. “With this day my journal ends, for I have now a living one to keep faithfully, more faithfully than this,” wrote Fanny Longfellow, wife of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, following the birth of the couple’s first child in 1844. In this case, however, the lure of the diary proved too strong, and Fanny later began a new series of journals on the progress of her children.

An eye on posterity

There are obvious reasons why the diaries of women such as Fanny Longfellow should have been preserved for future generations. Indeed, looking back through the archives, the wives and female relatives of famous men feature in the known chronicles of female diarists with disproportionate frequency. Dorothy Wordsworth’s description of dancing daffodils, after all, made it into her brother William’s most famous poetry.

One question that is begged by Fanny Burney’s vivid account of her mastectomy is: what actually counts as a diary? It was written as a journal letter, covering several months, and sent to her sister Esther. It nonetheless had the stamp of immediacy – like the diaries of, say American pioneer women travelling west, though these were often written for the benefit of the relatives they had left behind. But there is surely a distinction between the diary or journal and the memoir, written perhaps years later with a view to posterity.

It would be naive to assume that the apparently private form of the diary was not sometimes written with one eye on its future publication. Virginia Woolf speculated what kind of a book her husband Leonard would make of hers after her death, while the French essayist Anaïs Nin regarded her diaries as her life’s work and made sure she was photographed storing them in a bank vault for safekeeping. It would be similarly naive to ignore the huge role the editor of a published diary may have played, such as Princess Beatrice censoring the diaries of her mother Queen Victoria and destroying the originals.

Historically, the ability for a woman to both keep and preserve a diary was restricted to the professional and upper classes. This in turn has impacted the racial diversity of diaries available to us, though considerable work is being done to address that today. Indeed, the last few decades have not only seen the writings of noted anti-slavery activist Charlotte Forten becoming more widely accessible, but the diaries of other key figures – such as free black woman Emilie Davis and former slave Harriet Jacobs – made available in bookshops as well.

But if the profile of prominent diarists is changing, so too is the nature of the diary itself. Taking photos on mobile phones and even writing social media posts – though primarily a public medium, rather than a private one – can be considered akin to keeping a diary. One way or another, the creation of women’s diaries is an ongoing story, as will our study of them be too.

This article first appeared in the April 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine