Diary Writing

I

Introduction

Diary Writing, maintaining a regular written record creating a personal account or autobiography.

II

Beginnings

In pre-modern societies suitable conditions for diary writing were uncommon. In 10th-century Japan, Sei Shonagon and Shikibu Murasaki, women in the literate elite, recorded personal reflections on the imperial court. At about the same time in England, monks were also recording contemporary events. Such records formed the basis of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Japanese “diaries” and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are major works of literature and important historical sources.

III

Origins of Modern Diary Writing

Modern diary writing can be traced back to the 16th century when religion, especially Protestantism and Puritanism, provided the catalyst and technology, especially cheap paper, the means for diary writing. Protestantism stimulated reading and writing in the vernacular language and motivated individuals to record and scrutinize their own behaviour and moral standing. The influence of Protestantism can be seen in the journals kept by the boy-king Edward VI, the artist Albrecht Dürer, and Samuel Pepys, the English diarist par excellence.

Pepys came into contact with Puritan thinking during his education at Cambridge learning shorthand, which he used to protect his personal record. He first set pen to paper in 1660 and stopped writing in 1669. Rich in personal detail (of his sexual infidelities, for example), gossip, and eyewitness accounts of public events, such as the Great Fire of London, his diary typifies the strengths that the form can achieve. Above all, it reveals the complexities of a man given at once to peccadilloes and to guilt, to corruption and—an essential requirement of the diarist—ruthless self-honesty.

Another similarly intimate self-portrait emerges from the 19th-century journals kept by Francis Kilvert, edited and published by William Plomer in 1938-1940. A more cautious spirit ensured that the near-lifelong Kalendarium kept by Pepys's contemporary John Evelyn, first published in 1818, should be valuable chiefly as a witness to the political and intellectual upheavals he lived through.

IV

Influence on the Novel

The diary has often proved a tempting form for the novelist. Daniel Defoe used it in his Journal of the Plague Year (1722) to add immediacy and authenticity to a narrative constructed from the historical record. George and Weedon Grossmith in The Diary of a Nobody (1892), and Sue Townsend, in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 • (1982), have fun at the expense of the naive diarist; 1990s single-girl Bridget Jones's life and loves are chronicled in Bridget Jones's Diary (1996), by Helen Fielding.