It is, I think, nearly always a mistake to publish extracts from diaries or letters, particularly if the omissions have to be made in order to protect the feelings or reputations of the living. The omissions almost always distort or conceal the true character of the diarist or letter-writer and produce spiritually what an Academy picture does materially, smoothing out the wrinkles, warts, frowns, and asperities. At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer, because, as Virginia Woolf herself remarks somewhere in these diaries, one gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood--irritation or misery, say--and of not writing one's diary when one is feeling the opposite. The portrait is therefore from the start unbalanced, and, if someone then deliberately removes another characteristic, it may well become a mere caricature (vii-viii).

Two decades after A Writer's Diary was published, a multi-volume edition of the unpublished diaries of Virginia Woolf appeared; and, during the past twenty years, scholars have had ample opportunity to examine the diary in a less expurgated form. Leonard Woolf's comments about the selectivity, self-censorship, shaping of self-image, and danger of caricature inherent in the act of diary-keeping--as well as his concerns about the role of a diary's editor--have been proven valid by the work of scholars (e.g., Judy Nolte Lensink, Marlene Springer and Haskell Springer, Minrose Gwin, Gloria T. Hull, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Constance M. Fulmer and Margaret E. Barfield) who have analyzed and published editions of unpublished diaries over the past several decades. "Whose diary is it, anyway?" is not a facetious question, especially when one begins to explore issues involved in preparing an edition of a diary for publication.

Some people would say, "What a silly question. It's the diarist's diary." But is it? The question does not have so facile an answer. Is it the diarist's diary if the diarist is no longer living and the diary is privately held by one of the diarist's descendants? Is it then the family's diary? What if the diarist leaves no heirs? What if the prospective editor locates a distant cousin of the diarist and asks that cousin's permission to publish an edition of the diary, but the cousin never knew the diarist and never knew that a diary existed? Whose diary is it, anyway?

To take this question several steps further, what if the manuscript diary has lain in a trunk filled with family papers up in the attic for fifty years, then is discovered and is placed into the semi-public realm of historical society archives? Does it then become the historical society's diary? And, once an edition of a diary has been printed, does it become the publisher's diary? Or, once it is accessible in edited, printed form, does it become the reading public's diary?

Add to these questions the most vexing question of all: Who gets to determine whose diary it is? The complicated nature of this question is illustrated by the history of successive editions of one of the most well-known twentieth-century diaries, that kept by Anne Frank during World War II. In The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition (1991), its primary editor, Mirjam Pressler, discusses various editions of the diary since its first publication in 1947. In the edition's foreword, Pressler explains that Anne Frank kept a diary from June 12, 1942, until August 1, 1944. Although Anne initially kept it for herself, she soon decided that, when the war was over, she would publish a book based on her diary. At that point, Pressler adds, "she began rewriting and editing her diary, improving on the text, omitting passages she didn't think were interesting enough and adding others from memory. At the same time, she kept up her original diary" (v). Pressler refers to Anne Frank's first, unedited diary as version a to distinguish it from her second, edited diary, known as version b.

In August 1945, when Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank, returned to Amsterdam following the end of World War II, he received his daughter’s manuscript diary from his secretary, Miep Gies, who had gathered up and saved the various drafts (including the first bound volume, revised passages, short stories, and looseleaf papers)–all of which had been scattered across the floor of the attic annex when the Nazi troops uncovered the Frank family’s hiding place in August 1944, arrested them, and sent them away to Westerbork. Anne’s diary, a gift on her thirteenth birthday in June 1942, had been written primarily during the two-year-period during which the Frank family had been in hiding (5 July 1942 until 4 August 1944). Just after Mr. Frank learned that neither of his daughters had survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Miep Gies gave Anne’s diary to him. His initial intention was to transcribe selected passages from Dutch into German to send to his mother in Switzerland. When Otto Frank published the first abridged edition of his daughter's diary in 1947, he selected excerpts from both versions a and b, fashioning them into version c, which became known as The Diary of a Young Girl (1947). For many years, this was the edition from which a number of translations were made and on which the 1959 film, "The Diary of Anne Frank," was based.

After Otto Frank's death in 1980, his daughter's manuscripts were donated to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam; the copyright to the original diary is held by The Anne Frank Fonds (AFF) in Basel, Switzerland. In response to allegations that the diary was not authentic, an intensive five-year authentication process ensued during the 1980s. During this time, the diary was thoroughly analyzed (including an analysis to authenticate Anne Frank’s handwriting and painstaking tests on the diary’s paper and ink to verify that they had been produced during the late 1930s and early 1940s). The Anne Frank Fonds outlines findings of the authentication process as follows: "In 1986, the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) in Amsterdam published a scientific investigation (Critical Edition) on the authenticity of the Diary of ANNE FRANK. The forensic laboratory of the Netherlands Ministry of Justice in Rijswijk examined handwriting, papers, glue, inks, etc. The result confirms the authenticity of the Diary. The authenticity of the Diary has also been confirmed by a decision of the Hamburg Regional Court dated 23 March 1990. The AFF reserves the right to instigate criminal proceedings against any attack on the authenticity of the Diary of ANNE FRANK."

At the conclusion of the investigation, a variorum edition was published under the title, The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition (1989), edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom. This critical edition, which has been widely used by scholars, contains not only versions a, b, and c of Anne’s diary, but also biographical and historical essays as well as an analysis of the process by which the diary's authenticity was verified. Shortly after its publication, Ruth Wisse, writing in the New York Times Book Review, explained the rationale underlying the editorial process:

To allay doubts about the diary’s authorship, the editors reproduce three texts: all that was found of the original diary, of Anne’s revisions, and the diary as it was edited by her father, Otto Frank, on which the standard English translation is based. The differences we discover among the versions leave the familiar author substantially unchanged, except for deepening our appreciation of her craft ( 2).

The recent definitive edition of Anne Frank's diary, which lists Otto Frank’s name as first editor but which was prepared for publication by co-editor Mirjam Pressler, restores material originally edited out by Otto Frank. According to Pressler, the definitive edition contains "approximately 30 percent more material [than the first edition published by Otto Frank] and is intended to give the reader more insight into the world of Anne Frank" (vii). Pressler substitutes the real names of the individuals in the diary for the pseudonyms used by Otto Frank in the first edition. She also notes:

The reader may wish to bear in mind that much of this edition is based on the b version of Anne's diary, which she wrote when she was around fifteen years old. Occasionally, Anne went back and commented on a passage she had written earlier. These comments are clearly marked in this edition. Naturally, Anne's spelling and linguistic errors have been corrected. Otherwise, the text has basically been left as she wrote it, since any attempts at editing and clarification would be inappropriate in a historical document (viii).

Most recently, two critical biographies of Anne Frank–one authored in 1998 by Melissa Muller, the other authored in 1999 by Carol Ann Lee–discuss issues surrounding the various translations and editions of Anne Frank’s diary, including the questions surrounding the "five missing pages," not included in any edition of the diary. In 1998, these unpublished diary pages came to light; they had been given by Otto Frank to a colleague and friend, Cornelius Suijk, before the 1947 abridged edition of the diary was published. Recently, following the resolution of a prolonged controversy over who "owned" the "missing pages," they have been made available for publication in an updated critical edition of Anne Frank’s diary.

The publication histories of the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Anne Frank foreground crucial concerns faced by an editor of a manuscript diary--concerns that readers need to bear in mind when turning the pages of the finished book. Any diary that has been edited for publication, whether by a family member, an academic editor, a scholarly press, or a mass- market publishing house, bears the unmistakable marks of the editor(s) as well as the diarist. Although the diarist writes the diary, the editor or editors determine which diary entries (all, some, a few) will be included in the edited text of the manuscript diary. Not surprisingly, the exigencies of an editor's personal and professional life have a bearing on her or his preparation of the text of a manuscript diary into a published edition. If an editor is employed full time, he or she might be able to work on the edition only during infrequent (and often unpaid) breaks from his or her job responsibilities, the result being that the edition takes many years to prepare, market to a publisher, and usher through the publication process. If the original diary manuscript is housed in an archives and is non-circulating, the editing process might take even longer, given the editor’s need to work at the archives and observe restrictions placed on the use of the manuscript. Given such variables, it is not hard to see why, in many cases, editions of diarists are printed privately, with publication costs borne by an editor or by a descendant of the diarist.

Once plans for an edition of a diary are confirmed between an editor and an academic or popular press that will bear the financial responsibilities for the production of the finished book, many hidden costs remain the editor's responsibility. For instance, an editor typically incurs the expense of securing copies of public records (e.g., birth and death records, probate records). An editor often pays to have copy negatives and 8 x 10 glossies of old family photographs reproduced for use in the edition of the diary. If an editor needs to travel to the locale in which the diarist lived and wrote (sometimes even to the extent of prowling a local cemetery in search of a grave marker that spells out how and when a diarist's story ended), the editor incurs those travel and research expenses.

Yet, despite an editor's "spadework," he or she does not often exercise complete control over the published edition of the diary. Considerations such as the press's publication budget, for instance, often dictate the number of pages to be included in the finished book. Many published editions contain only 10 to 20% of the entries in the unpublished manuscript diary. In recent years, as production costs have risen, a publisher must factor in the price of paper, the cost of binding, the cost of reproducing photographs and documents to illustrate an edition, the cost of marketing and distribution, the time and talent brought to the process by the press's in-house copy editors and marketing directors--all of which ultimately influence not only the ways in which a manuscript diary is transformed into an edited, published text but also how widely the text is advertised and reviewed--and how well it sells.

"Which diary it is, anyway?" is another important question. When an original manuscript diary is edited in any way, whether by the diarist herself or by an outside editor or series of editors, how does such editing, with its inevitable inclusion and exclusion of passages, possible rephrasing and rewriting, change what the diary is as well as who its author is?

Take the case of Emily Hawley Gillespie's diary, which she kept from 1858-1888. Emily began her diary while a girl in Michigan; she continued it as a wife and mother in Iowa, until shortly before her death at age 49. Ten handwritten volumes of the diary, filling over 2,000 manuscript pages and covering thirty years in the diarist's life, are housed at the State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI) archives in Iowa City. Of the ten volumes in the SHSI collections, only the second five are in Emily's own handwriting. The first five volumes are in the meticulous handwriting of Emily's daughter, Sarah Gillespie Huftalen. Why? Because Sarah recopied the first five volumes of her mother's diary before donating them to the SHSI in the late 1940s.

What happened to the original manuscripts of the first five volumes of Emily Hawley Gillespie's diary? This was the question that Judy Nolte Lensink posed in the mid-1980s, when she began preparing an edition of the diaries for publication. As it turned out, the original manuscripts were in the possession of distant Gillespie cousins who lived in Michigan. Before her death in 1955, Sarah had sent the originals to her cousins there, once she had completed her recopying task and sent the ten volumes of her mother's diary to the SHSI. Because Judy Lensink was unable to locate the original manuscript diaries and needed to complete her edition, which was adapted from her doctoral dissertation, she based "A Secret to Be Burried: The Diary and Life of Emily Hawley Gillespie, 1858-1888 (1989) on the five volumes of Emily's diaries recopied by Sarah as well as on the five volumes still in Emily's own handwriting. Lensink’s edition, which was published both in cloth and paperback, received favorable reviews and was awarded the Shambaugh Prize for the best work of Iowa history published in 1989.

Emily Hawley Gillespie was not the only member of her family to keep diaries. Her daughter, Sarah Gillespie Huftalen, did so as well, beginning in 1873, when she was eight, and continuing throughout her adult life. The Gillespie Papers acquisition file indicates that Sarah donated not only her mother's diaries to the SHSI; she also donated seventeen volumes of her own diaries that covered the period from 1873-1952. These handwritten diaries, comprised of over 3,500 manuscript pages, caught my interest when I was studying the diaries of Sarah’s mother, Emily. Soon I set out to prepare a scholarly edition of Sarah's diaries. My initial intention was to create an edition of the daughter's diaries that would compliment Judy Lensink's edition of the mother's diaries. As I worked on the edition, however, I began to sense that it was taking on a life of its own.

I spent the summer of 1991 in Iowa City, seated at a computer back in a dark corner of the SHSI archives, transcribing entries from Sarah's diary. Some days I would enter the SHSI at 8:00 a.m. and not emerge until it closed its doors at 4:30 p.m. During those hours, I would sit at my computer station reading Sarah’s manuscript diaries, selecting entries, then transcribing them onto diskettes. As the diary’s editor, I felt an obligation to do all of the selection, transcription, and editing myself. So I typed fast and feverishly, knowing that, once the summer was over, I would need to return to my full time teaching position in Minnesota and would have no further opportunity to transcribe additional diary entries until the following summer.

As I read the faded manuscript diary pages and selected entries to type into the computer, I realized that I had begun including certain entries and excluding others based on the objective of creating a book that would interweave several thematic, structural, and stylistic strands in the manuscript diaries: Sarah's childhood on the family farm, the conflicts in her parents' marriage, their effects on Sarah and her brother Henry, Sarah's fifty-two-year career as a teacher, her twenty-two-year marriage to Billie Huftalen, her unhappy retirement years on the family farm with her brother Henry, her determination to see not only her mother's, but also her own, diaries preserved and made accessible to readers in the archives.

I knew that Sarah's diary, like other women's diaries published in recent years, would help to dispel the myths that a diary is an intensely private text written for no audience except the diarist and that a diary represents a haphazard compilation of daily detail with little thought for the past or future. If, as I reasoned, Sarah had not wanted her diary read by anyone except herself, why did she save all seventeen volumes, insert many looseleaf pages into them, then donate everything to the official state archives with the stated intention of making her diaries available to interested readers? As I saw it, Sarah intended her diary to be what Robert Fothergill has called "a Book of the Self" (1974); that is, a life narrative consciously shaped by a diarist into a form that would, between its covers, tell the diarist's version of the story of a life.

I decided to examine Sarah's 3,500 pages of diary entries covering seventy-eight years of her life both as a family chronicle that embodied "the diverse strategies used by one woman to preserve her life story for future generations" and also as an exemplar of the diary as a "primary form of autobiography for a woman whose life, work, and writing did not lend themselves to traditional definitions of autobiography" ("All Will Yet Be Well", 2). I hoped that the entire manuscript diary could serve as the basis for a two-volume published edition to be entitled "All Will Yet Be Well": The Diary of Sarah Gillespie Huftalen, 1873-1952. I contacted the same press that had published Judy Lensink’s edition of Emily Hawley Gillespie’s diary and proposed a companion edition of her daughter Sarah’s diary. The publisher and I quickly and agreeably negotiated a book contract.

The only thing that troubled me was my knowledge that I would be able to include only 15-20% of Sarah’s original handwritten diary entries in the edition that I was preparing. I needed to work within the constraints set by my publisher, who stipulated that, due to publishing costs, the completed book could be no more than 350 pages, including all scholarly apparatus. Given the scope of Sarah’s diary (78 years of lengthy, very detailed diary entries covering 3,500 pages) and the intensity of my belief in its merits, I lobbied the publisher for a two-volume edition, but I was quickly informed that this idea was not feasible. Why? Because the publisher felt that producing a two-volume edition would be too costly. I also hoped to write a short essay to precede each chapter, as Judy Lensink had done with Emily Gillespie’s diary, as a means of introducing certain segments of Sarah’s diary within their historical and cultural context. This idea, too, was rejected by the publisher, since its implementation would have resulted in a much longer, more expensive book. I was advised that the 350-page edition was to include only an introductory and a concluding essay, along with endnotes, bibliography, and index. My excitement over the hundreds of excellent historical photographs in the Gillespie-Huftalen Collection was tempered by my publisher’s explanation that my edition of Sarah’s diary could include only a limited number because the book would too expensive to produce if it included a lot of photographs. Despite my initial chafing under the restrictions outlined above, my work on the edition progressed, and the publishing process went smoothly. The book, appearing in a limited cloth edition of 500 copies (selling for $45.00 each) as well as a larger paperback edition of 1,500 copies (selling for $18.95 each), was published in 1993.

A year after "All Will Yet Be Well" was published, it was reviewed in The Annals of Iowa by Barbara Handy-Marchello, who observed: "Suzanne Bunkers edited this diary with a gentle hand. She never imposes her own thoughts or words over Sarah’s, although the temptation must have been strong at times. As editor she introduces the diary as a literary form and fills in the biographical gaps" (397). Despite offering this praise, Handy-Marchello noted the negative impact of the publisher’s decision not to include introductory chapter essays: "I would have preferred that some of the extensive information in the endnotes were inserted into the chapters or included in introductory essays to the chapters," concluding that the "form Bunkers used, however, erects no barriers between Huftalen and the reader" (397). I appreciated the reviewer’s thoughtful review of my edition of Sarah’s diary, and I shared her desire for more context to surround the excerpts from Sarah’s diary that made up the heart of the edition. Alas, it was not to be. It was a hard lesson for me to learn: the diary was no longer Sarah’s, nor was it mine (if it ever had been). It now belonged to the publisher, and business concerns would supersede aesthetics.

During my preparation of an edition of Sarah Gillespie Huftalen's diary, a new and exciting development occurred. Judy Lensink and I made contact with Lee Baker, a descendant of a distant cousin of the Gillespies. Lee lived in Michigan, and over the next two years he tracked down the original manuscripts of Emily Hawley Gillespie's first five diaries as well as a cache of family letters. All had been stored in a box in another cousin's attic for nearly fifty years. Judy and I were elated; however, as editors and textual scholars, both of us felt a bit of trepidation at the possibility of what these manuscripts might reveal. In July 1996, Lee Baker brought them to Iowa so that Judy and I could study them in conjunction with a diaries workshop and chautauqua (in which Judy and I portrayed Emily and Sarah Gillespie) as part of Iowa's Sesquicentennial Celebration.

As Lee Baker explained to us, his reading of Emily’s original diary entries (most of which were fragments that Emily had written on looseleaf foolscap), made clear to him that there were actually two versions of these diary entries, version a and version b. Emily herself had written and rewritten her early diaries. Then, years later, her daughter Sarah had recopied these entries, creating version c, on which Judy Lensink had based her edition of Emily's diary.

Now, five years later, Judy and I like to joke, "Which of Emily's diaries are we talking about?" Are we talking about version a? version b? -- the two early handwritten versions which have lain in an attic in Michigan all these years? Or are we talking about version c? -- the neatly handwritten draft prepared by Emily's daughter Sarah for the SHSI archives? Are we talking about the edited diary (let's call it version d), which, according to Judy, contains approximately 15% of the entries in the ten archived volumes? And let's not forget version e, the "new, old edition" of Emily Hawley Gillespie's early diaries and letters that Judy and I are hoping to publish as the third book in the saga of the Gillespie women's diaries. Judy’s recent article, "They Shut Me Up In Prose: A Cautionary Tale of Two Emilys," takes readers on the editor’s journey and outlines her growing sense of having been duped by the diarist. Temple explains:

To subvert this limiting division between "literary" diarists and "others," I will expose my own scholarly journey, from my initial encounter with a suggestive diary manuscript made all the more compelling because it was written by an ordinary woman, to the recent discovery of earlier versions of that diary that undermine my career as a diary researcher. For it is now revealed that early sections of the diary of Emily Hawley Gillespie, published as 'A Secret to be Burried,' were from a third version of the journal, rewritten by Gillespie twenty years after the original. Rather than an authentic text of an "ordinary" life, the archived manuscript diary was a subtlely altered journal about an idealized past and imagined youth that rendered the older woman's unhappy journal of her subsequent brutal marriage incredibly poignant. Therefore, all that I have written about Gillespie's journal, some of which having been recently reprinted in a Gale reference text as basic readings on the nonliterary diary as history and as autobiography, is based on a faux diary. I am a scholar scorned by a diary constructed to appear so ordinary that its extraordinary qualities seemed all the more luminescent (153).

"Which diary it is, anyway?" becomes an even more complex and vexing question in light of multi-generational and multi-edited diaries like those of Emily and Sarah Gillespie.

"Who is the diarist’s intended audience?" This question has evolved into a central concern for the editors of diaries. In her essay, "'I Write for Myself and Strangers': Private Diaries and Public Documents," Lynn Z. Bloom notes that "not all diaries are written--ultimately or exclusively--for private consumption. Very often, in either the process of composition over time, or in the revision and editing that some of the most engaging diaries undergo, these superficially private writings become unmistakably public documents, intended for an external readership" (Inscribing the Daily, 23). Bloom's observation parallels others made by such scholars as Philippe Lejeune, Margo Culley, Rebecca Hogan, Minrose Gwin, Cynthia Huff, Cinthia Gannett, Judy Nolte [Lensink] Temple, Lucia McMahan, Deborah Schriver, Elizabeth Podnieks, Amy Wink, and myself–who recognize the complex interplay of purpose, audience, and context that inevitably underlies, encircles, and permeates a diary’s text. 

My current project, Diaries of Girls and Women: a Midwestern American Sampler (2001), has provided much food for thought–not only about the multi-faceted role that the editor of such an anthology must play but also about the diverse purposes and audiences that compel diarists to write. My goal is to bring to light the experiences of young schoolgirls, adolescents coming of age, newlywed wives, mothers grieving the loss of children, teachers, nurses, elderly women, and women travelers. This collection includes excerpts from diaries from historical society archives and diaries still in possession of the diarists or their descendants. By looking at diaries as historical documents, therapeutic tools, and a form of literature, I hope to offer readers insights into the self-images of girls and women, the dynamics of families and communities, and the kinds of contributions that girls and women have made, past and present. This collection will, I hope, add texture to the fabric of Midwestern U.S. history. My purpose in editing this collection is twofold: 1) to explore the ways in which diaries document the diverse experiences of individuals and families and 2) to understand the ways in which diaries function as forms of life writing in which self-representation is at the core of the writer's work. 

For many Midwestern American girls and women over the past 150 years, diaries have not necessarily been the intensely secretive texts that come to mind when most present-day readers imagine diaries with little locks and keys. Although many diaries were "private" in the sense that they were not published, these texts were often meant to be shared with family members and/or close friends. Sometimes a diary even functioned as a collaborative text, with more than one person writing in it, or with one family member (often a female) writing what was meant to become a family record, an artifact of material culture to be treasured by many generations. Based on it complexity of purpose and audience, the diary occupies a unique place in literature and history as a text that can be both personal and communal. 

As the editor of Diaries of Girls and Women, I found that my most difficult role was that 
of "The Excisor"–the individual who must delete individual diary entries (and sometimes 
entire diarists) from the planned collection, in accordance with the contractual 
agreement limiting the finished book to 450 pages. Two years ago, when I began to merge 
all of the individual diarists' files that I had diligently transcribed and put onto 
disk, I had no idea that my first draft of the manuscript would come to over 1100 pages. 
So the next step was to pare down the manuscript from 1100 to 550 double-spaced pages, 
from fifty-nine diarists to forty-six diarists. Doing so meant becoming highly selective 
about how much or each diarist's work could be included. At most, I could offer readers 
snapshots of individual diarists' lives. I ended my introduction to the collection by 
asking, "Can any diary, edited or unexpurgated, tell the whole story of an individual's 
life? I do not believe so, for the simple reason that no text can tell the whole story 
of an individual's life" (31-32).  And I asked readers to "remember that no excerpt from 
a diarist's work is intended to represent either an entire diary or an entire life" (32). 

"What is the relationship between form and function in the diary?" Unlike many other forms of narrative, a diary need not be plot driven. Many, in fact, are not, as Helen M. Buss points out in her study of diaries by nineteenth-century Canadian women. Buss notes a phrase that she has come across in several diaries: "as they say in novels." She emphasizes the irony in a diarist’s use of this phrase, given "all the ways in which this and similar accounts are different from novels, all the ways in which they do not fulfill the novelistic assumptions of the reader, all the ways in which they demand a different relationship with the reader" (57). Some publishers, however, expect that diaries, like fictional narratives, must be plot-driven to have literary merit. This unfortunate and shortsighted belief has resulted in many manuscript diaries not being published as well as in pressure being placed on an editor to attempt to force a diary’s text into a traditional narrative frame.

This is not to say that pragmatic concerns never impinge on an editor’s world view, particularly if that editor is a professor hoping for promotion and/or tenure on the basis of his/her work as an editor of diaries. Writing about her current work on the dream-diaries of Baby Doe Tabor, Judy Nolte [Lensink] Temple makes this wry observation: "What scholars, including myself, do to diaries in the name of love and/or promotion, has both gained acceptance of our field of study while at the same time delaying the inevitable face-to-face meeting between readers and actual diaries" ( Inscribing the Daily, 77). In this essay, Judy Nolte Temple discusses the related issue of whether a published edition of a diary needs to follow traditional narrative patterns (i.e., rising action, conflict, climax, denouement) in order to succeed as a narrative version of a diarist's life. Temple talks about three criteria often deemed necessary by publishers for gauging the potential worth of a manuscript diary: plot, setting, and character. Temple observes: "These three conventional criteria, right out of high school freshman English, exclude more diaries than they include. Only if the writer is among the literary elite--Woolf, Nin--do readers accept more fluidity within the text and its persona" (77).

In Daily Modernism, her critical study of the literary diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anais Nin, scholar Elizabeth Podnieks focuses on the diary as a "subversive literary space for women" (6). "The diary is a place where women can express themselves through narratives which conform to culturally scripted life stories, while at the same time they can rewrite them to reflect their subversive desires and experiences" (6). As Podnieks explains, "Women's inscriptions of taboo experiences, coupled with their 'shaping' of stories within diaries intended for audiences, underscore my argument that women's diaries are subversive spaces" (7). Podnieks continues, "The issue of genre authenticity is linked to the question of whether the self can ever be known and whether it can be rendered accurately, if at all, in words. Defining the self is one of the most problematic tasks facing theorists of life writing, one that today remains unresolved" (5). Podnieks concludes, "How we interpret the self impacts on how we read a diary. Though definitions of selfhood remain problematic, theorists of life writing generally acknowledge that the self is always to some degree invented; the diary that contains this self is thus at least partially fictive" (5).

Claire Sorin, who is completing her doctoral dissertation, explores fascinating questions concerning the genre. In The Body in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Diaries, 1830-1870, Sorin states her basic question in this way: "How do women write in (or 'write out') their bodies at a time when the female body was made the object of a wide range of discourses defining it both as disembodied (via the cult of the 'true woman' who was supposedly passionless and spiritual) and embodied (via the glorification of motherhood and more precisely through the medical discourse focusing on the nature and the influence of woman's reproductive organs)? How, in other words, do public discourses on the body interact with private writings? " In her study, Sorin elaborates on this question: "The interplay between ideology and experience creates a network of echoes and dissonance which is interesting to study in diaries that became a widespread form of writing among 19th-century middle-class women . . . The interplay between self- effacement and self-inscription constitutes a major mode of 19th-century diary-writing that will be worth studying. In particular, the rejection/effacement of a sexual self and the identification with a suffering body are two common autobiographical strategies" (e-mail communication from Claire Sorin to Suzanne Bunkers, Fri, 19 Jan 2001 21:25:59).

Recent scholarly editions of individual women’s diaries affirm what diary scholars have been asserting for years: the diary sometimes functions as a form of autobiography for its writer. Constance M. Fulmer and Margaret E. Barfield’s new edition of the diary of Edith J. Simcox is a case in point. Simcox (1844-1901), an independent Victorian woman, was a business woman, social reformer, scholar, and journalist who kept a detailed diary from 1876-1900. In this diary, which Simcox entitled Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, she recorded daily activities, personal reflections, and her devotion to George Eliot. This diary, written over a quarter century’s time, became the "authorized" version of her life story; today, it represents her only extant writing. The scholarly edition of Simcox’s diary includes the entire text of the manuscript diary, which is housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Fulmer’s and Barfield’s dedication to seeing Edith Simcox’s diary/autobiography published in its entirety provides a much wider perspective on the diarist than previously available in the work of such scholars as K. A. McKenzie, whose analysis emphasizes what is termed Simcox’s "pathological obsession" with George Eliot (xv).

Lucia McMahon and Deborah Schriver’s new edition, To Read My Heart: The Journal of Rachel Van Dyke, 1810-1811, offers readers and scholars another fascinating case study. When she began writing in this journal in May 1810, Rachel Van Dyke was a seventeen-year-old school girl living in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She did not write in a hard-bound journal like those used by many adolescent girls today; rather, Rachel Van Dyke wrote journal entries that she grouped into twenty-three numbered 4 x 6 inch fascicles, each approximately 40-48 pages in length. Although the first fascicle has not been located, the twenty-two fascicles that remain, and that have been edited by Lucia McMahon and Deborah Schriver into this large volume, provide contemporary readers with fascinating insights into the daily life of a young woman who not only described her daily life but also expressed her opinions on friendship, gender roles, religion, education, and other subjects. As McMahon and Schriver explain, "Her commentaries reflect the culture of the time and have special value as the expression of a nineteenth-century young woman seeking to understand her own role as an emerging adult" (1).

This edition of the diary of Rachel Van Dyke is also significant because it disproves a common stereotype: the concept of the journal (or diary) as a very private text, one intended to be read by no one other than the writer herself. Although this kind of text has traditionally been viewed as a "private" rather than a "public" text, scholars who study journals have verified that actual journals can often function as both public and private texts. In fact, for many nineteenth-century girls such as Rachel Van Dyke, the journal was not the intensely secretive kind of text envisioned when most present-day readers imagine diaries with little locks and keys.

Like many other chroniclers, Rachel Van Dyke decided to share her journal with another journal writer–her teacher, Ebenezer Grosvenor, to whom she referred as "Mr. G–." The editors explain that, before giving fascicles of her journal to Mr. Grosvenor, "Rachel reviewed her entries and wrote editorial comments and notes to him in the margins" (1). He wrote comments (and editorial corrections) back to her and, on occasion, exchanged volumes of his journal with Rachel so that she could read and respond to what he had written. This exchange results in Rachel Van Dyke’s journal becoming a more complex text, one that contains "an overlay of Rachel’s critical comments on her original entries and a running dialogue between Rachel and Mr. G– that reveals additional dimensions of her personality, a rich relationship between teacher and student, and a developing romantic friendship" (2). In publishing the diary of Rachel Van Dyke, the editors analyze the provocative issue of Mr. G– as a potential "ghost writer" of Rachel Van Dyke’s journal (329).

Kathryn Carter’s recent scholarly work on unpublished diary manuscripts confirms their importance as a form of life writing for Canadian women, past and present. Carter explains: "In addition to foregrounding a woman’s relations to the material conditions of writing, and the discourses available to her at specific moments in history, diaries also highlight the role of audience, issues of publicity and privacy, and their effect upon the act of writing" (20). In examining not only the material conditions of diarists’ production of texts but also their uses of such strategies as indirection, silence, and euphemism, Carter stresses the importance of the manuscript diary as "currency in a social exchange about history, about community and communication, about family and friendship" (Voix Feministes, 21). In her forthcoming collection, The Small Details of a Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996, editor Carter delves into all of these issues, framing excerpts from diaries with a cogent historical and theoretical analysis of Canadian women’s diaries.

Certainly, in its subversion of traditional narrative techniques and forms, in its uses of interruptions, eruptions, resistance, and contradiction, the diary reflects its author’s presence in the text, as evidenced in diverse strategies of self-representation. Like Kathryn Carter, I work primarily with unpublished manuscript diaries; and, based on my research over the past fifteen years, I can say without hesitation that many of these diaries do not follow a traditional narrative pattern characterized by successive movements of exposition, rising action, conflict, climax, resolution, denouement. Like any form of writing, a diary may well reflect its writer’s sense of purpose and audience as well as its writer’s use of narrative strategies (e.g., characterization, setting, dialogue).

How much (or little) of the diarist’s story is it? This is yet another crucial question to explore when a manuscript diary is being considered for publication. Can any diary, edited or unexpurgated, tell the whole story about an individual's life? Many scholars of the diary analyze the ways in which diarists use forms of encoding to include--and exclude--specific subjects as they use their texts to seek and shape meaning. In the introduction to She Left Nothing in Particular: 19th Century Women's Diaries, Amy Wink explores the way in which a diary can foster the creative act of writing as a way of seeking meaning: "Using writing to explore her world, a diarist lays out a line of words and reaffirms her mental capabilities. Constructing sentences that create patterns and images with language exercises her intellectual power. In such construction, these women sometimes used writing to find a way through extremely difficult personal circumstances. By writing, these women created something tangible--a record of their thoughts or interpretations of their experiences--out of something intangible--their personal experiences" (xvii).

Like Margo Culley and other scholars, Amy Wink speculates on the role that gaps and blank spaces play in individuals' diaries: "These blank spaces may reveal the failure of writing to explain sufficiently a writer's thoughts. Though the readers may privilege writing as a means of expression and be spurred by curiosity to find out what is missing, the writer herself may find writing about certain subjects dull, unsatisfying, unsuccessful, or inadequate to deal with the subject . . . The stark description, the brief entry, the broken-off sentence may be all that is needed to fully describe and relate the writer's response" (xxi).

I understand what she means. When I began editing The Diary of Caroline Seabury, 1854-1863 (1991), over a decade ago, I knew that I wanted my edition to include every word written during the nine-year-period during the Civil War era when Caroline kept her diary while teaching at a female academy in Columbus, Mississippi. The impetus for Caroline’s starting the diary was her arrival in the South to accept a position teaching French and Shakespeare to the daughters of wealthy white plantation owners. Not long after Caroline accepted her position in the fall of 1854, her younger sister Martha joined her in Columbus. The sisters set out to keep a collaborative diary, with Caroline recording events and feelings that the sisters thought would serve in later years to jog their memories of life in "the Sunny South."

The Seabury sisters’ initial naivete about the realities of life in the slaveholding South was soon displaced by their observations, recorded in their diary, of human beings beaten and sold from one slave owner to another. Martha, having fallen victim to the family disease of consumption (tuberculosis), died in 1858, leaving Caroline to carry on alone. Caroline continued writing in her diary through the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 until shortly after the Battle of Vicksburg in July 1863, at which point she was able to secure passage back to the North by hiding on a boat taking Union soldiers up the Mississippi River.

Caroline Seabury’s 180-page manuscript diary fascinated me. How did it ever end up in the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) archives, given that Caroline had been a native of Massachusetts and had gone directly from New England to Mississippi? Once I'd had the chance to study the acquisition file on Caroline's diary, I learned that the archives had accepted the diary in the early 1950s because it had been written by the sister of Channing Seabury, the man who had chaired the commission that had built the Minnesota State Capitol. The acquisition file indicated that the archives had declined to accept other artifacts found in Caroline Seabury's trunk when the family home in St. Paul was cleaned out and sold sixty years after her death in 1893. These artifacts, including a hand-sewn Union flag that had been instrumental in helping Caroline escape from the South following the Battle of Vicksburg in 1863, were not deemed important enough to add to the MHS collections.

I wondered whether other volumes of Caroline's diary had been deemed unimportant, either by archivists or family members, and then discarded? This diary was the only one extant in the Channing Seabury Family Papers at the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS), yet I suspected that it might not have been the only diary that Caroline Seabury had ever kept. When I approached a publisher with the typescript I had prepared from Caroline Seabury’s manuscript diary, I made the case for including the entire diary in the edition that I wanted to prepare. The publisher agreed, and we negotiated a contract.

I then turned my attention to locating background information about Caroline Seabury, her family, and her possible heirs. Soon I made contact with Caroline’s ninety-eight-year-old niece, Edyth Seabury Nye, the daughter of Caroline’s younger brother, Channing Seabury. Edyth, who had been born in St. Paul, had returned to the family’s New England roots in North Chatham, MA. When I wrote to Edyth Nye, asking her permission to publish an edition of her aunt’s diary, I was not prepared for her reply: she wrote to tell me that she had had no idea that a diary even existed. After all, her aunt Caroline had died in 1893, a few years before Edyth’s birth. All Edyth knew about her aunt was that a large trunk had been stored in the attic of the family’s St. Paul, MN, for many years. Edyth’s mother told her that the trunk had belonged to her deceased aunt, Caroline. Not only was Edyth delighted to learn of the existence of Caroline’s diary, she welcomed its eventual publication; and she provided much background on her Seabury ancestry to be used in the introduction to the book.

As I worked on my edition of Caroline Seabury’s diary, I pondered the possibility that she had kept other diaries. I am convinced that she did, although no other volumes survive. I base my belief on the experience of having kept a diary of my own for the past thirty-five years. I know that, for many individuals, it is much easier to continue keeping a diary than to quit keeping one. Like many diarists, I keep on writing; and I look forward to carving out moments when I can sit quietly at the table with a cup of coffee, listening to the early-morning news on NPR, writing in my diary before my daughter awakens and our daily rhythms of school and work are once again underway.

There are now approximately 120 volumes of my diary, which I recently stacked inside several large water-proof plastic containers and moved to the basement of our home in preparation for their journey to the Iowa Women's Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries in Iowa City. But I'm not ready to part with my diaries yet. I'm not so sure I'm ready for some researcher to phone or e-mail me with a request that I explicate a cryptic passage from my diary, which she would like to edit for publication.

Every now and them, I unpack selected volumes of my diary out when I want to reread what was happening in my life five, ten, fifteen, twenty, or thirty years ago. In 1995, I was completing final revisions on the manuscript of In Search of Susanna, a work of auto/biography published in the University of Iowa Press's Singular Lives Series in American Autobiography. Included in the book were excerpts from my own diaries. Ironically, and (more than once) discomfitingly, I discovered myself in the role of editor of my own manuscript diaries. At the same time, I continued to write in the current volume of my diary about what it was like to reread my old diaries, then cull entries from them to incorporate into the text of In Search of Susanna (1996). On January 31, 1995, I wrote:

I felt drained after typing diary entries yesterday. I don't think I can deal with my own diaries in the same way I can deal with the diary of someone like Caroline Seabury or Sarah Gillespie Huftalen. When I reread what I wrote back then in my diary, the emotions come charging to the surface, and I am sometimes awash in tears, as I was yesterday . . .

And the "me" writing then is and is not the "me" rereading it all now. Then, I mostly just wrote and I didn't agonize a lot or censor myself as I write. Now I know I'm more cautious not only about what I say but also about how I say it and how much (if any) of it I put into writing. I wonder how I'll feel in 20 years when I reread the journal entries here? I know that, when I reread old journals now, I sometimes cringe at what I wrote, or I feel sorry for the self I was then because I know so much more now about how or why certain things transpired then. But I don't regret having kept a journal all these years, and I think I can "mine" it for information to be used in other things I write (Bunkers, In Search of Susanna, 229-230).

Even as I write this paper, I'm "mining" my own diaries for information, just as I've been digging around in musty archives, reading other women's diaries, for the past twenty years.

Whose diary is it, anyway? Well, the volumes of diaries in storage in my family’s home are mine. I think. But I did leave them to my daughter, Rachel, in my will. Some years ago, Rachel took out my first diary, which I began keeping back when I was ten years old. Reaching between two diary pages, my daughter pulled out the school picture of my first boyfriend, Gary, whom I’d met at the Orange City, Iowa, roller rink in seventh grade. She asked me, "Mom, who’s this?" Was I going to tell my young daughter that my parents had forbidden me to date Gary because he was what my parents referred to as a "Dike-hopper" (that is, a member of the Dutch Reformed Church), a belief system anathema to their staunch Catholic sensibilities? I admit it; I felt a tad bit queasy when, six feet away, my daughter was chuckling over some of the girlhood diary entries that "Susie Bunkers" made.

Some years back, I told my colleague and friend, Rebecca Hogan (herself a diaries scholar) that, if she wanted, she could take first crack at editing my diary for publication. (If it ever comes to that.) And I did tell the Iowa Women's Archives that, with Rachel's permission, my diaries could someday be donated there. And I'm telling you all of this right now. So maybe the question is not really "Whose diary is it, anyway?" Perhaps the bottom line is this: "Can I truly own my own diaries, any more than I can own diaries kept by any other individual?  I hope that, during the next two days, our community of diarists can explore this and many other questions. I look forward to undertaking that exploration with you.

NOTE: All URLs listed below were last accessed on 20 November 2001.

Bloom, Lynn Z. "'I Write for Myself and Others': Private Diaries as Public Documents." Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries. 23-27.

Bloom, Lynn Z. "‘I Write for Myself and Others’: Private Diaries as Public Documents." Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries. Ed. Bunkers and Huff. 23-27.

Bunkers, Suzanne L., ed. "All Will Yet Be Well": The Diary of Sarah Gillespie Huftalen, 1873- 1952. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993. For more information, click on this URL:  http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress/bunallwil.htm 

__________________. ed.  Diaries of Girls and Women: a Midwestern American Sampler.  Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.  For more information, click on this URL:  http://www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/books/3054.htm 

__________________,ed. The Diary of Caroline Seabury, 1854-1863. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Bunkers, Suzanne. L., and Cynthia A. Huff, eds. Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.   For more information, click on this URL:  http://krypton.mankato.msus.edu/~susanna/inscribi.htm 

Buss, Helen M. "Pioneer Women's Diaries and Journals: Letters Home/Letters to the Future." Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women's Autobiography in English. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993. 37-60.

Carter, Kathryn, ed.  The Small Details of a Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996. Forthcoming from University of Toronto Press, 2002. For more information, please contact kcarter@wlu.ca 

Carter, Kathryn. Voix Feministes, Feminist Voices. Diaries in English by Women in Canada, 1753-1995: An Annotated Bibliography. Ottawa: CRIAW/ICREF, 1997.

Culley, Margo C., ed. A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present. New York: The Feminist Press, 1985.

Fothergill, Robert. Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. Ed. Otto Frank. New York: Pocket Books, 1972. First published in 1947 under the title, Het Achterhuis.

___________. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition. Ed. David Barnouw and Gerrold Van Der Stroom. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

___________. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Definitive Edition. Ed. Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler. Trans. Susan Massotty. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Fulmer, Constance, and Margaret E. Barfield, eds. A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith J. Simcox's Autobiography of a Shirtmaker. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998.

Gannett, Cinthia. Gender and the Journal: Diaries and Academic Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.  For more information, click on this URL:  http://www.sunypress.edu/sunyp/backads/html/gannettgender.html 

Gwin, Minrose C., ed. A Woman's Civil War: A Diary, with Reminiscences of the War, from March 1862, by Cornelia Peake McDonald. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

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Hinz, Evelyn. "Mimesis: The Dramatic Lineage of Auto/Biography." Essays on Life Writing. Ed. Marlene Kadar. 195-212.

Hogan, Rebecca. "Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a Feminine Form." Prose Studies: Special Issue on Autobiography and Questions of Gender 14.2 (September 1991): 95-107.

Huff, Cynthia. "'That Profoundly Female, and Feminist Genre': The Diary as Feminist Praxis." Women's Studies Quarterly 17.3-4 (Fall-Winter 1989): 6-14.

Huff, Cynthia. "Reading as Re-vision: Approaches to Reading Manuscript Diaries. Biography 23.3. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/biography/v023/23.3huff.pdf?  

Hull, Gloria T., ed. Give Us This Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984.

Iowa Women's Archives.  University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.  Collection Development Information Policy:  http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/iwa/policy.html 
Link to Article on IWA in Iowa Alumni Magazine, 2001:  http://www.iowalum.com/magazine/august01/archives.html 

Kadar, Marlene. "Coming to Terms: Life Writing--from Genre to Critical Practice." Essays on Life Writing. Ed. Marlene Kadar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 3-27. 

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Woolf, Virginia. A Writer's Diary. Ed. Leonard Woolf. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953.

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22 August 2001