"My journal was and is the safe and cherishing container in which I can be

any part of myself that needs to voice whoever she is in whatever words."  

--Marion Woodman

Marion Woodman’s observation about the value of keeping a diary or journal speaks to me on two levels. First, it resonates with my knowledge of diaries kept by midwestern girls and women living in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin during the past 150 years. This book is based on my study of more than four hundred such diaries–some kept only briefly, others kept during an entire lifetime; some written as the intensely private record of a life, others written to tell the story of an entire family–stories meant to be saved and appreciated by future generations.

Second, Woodman’s observation resonates with my own experience as a diarist during a forty-year period. In my attic study are approximately one hundred volumes of diaries that I have been keeping since 1970. Before then I wrote in three earlier diaries that I kept between 1960 and 1968, from my tenth to eighteenth years, when I was growing up in Granville, Iowa. When I found my girlhood and adolescent diaries in my mother’s attic several years ago, I sneaked them downstairs and locked myself in the bathroom, where (just as I had done many years before) I spent hours poring over individual diary entries I had made.

My first diary is still my favorite. It is a one-year diary, about four inches by six inches, with one page of nineteen lines) per day, and with each day’s date printed at the top of that page. Even though it was a one-year diary, I quickly subverted that format and made it last for a number of years by writing only half-page entries one year, then writing the next year’s entry for that same date on the bottom half of each page. I didn’t write in my diary every day, however. Sometimes a week or a month would go by without my making a single entry. A few years later, even though I was officially keeping a five-year diary, I would go back to my original one-year diary and use its blank pages to write about experiences whose recounting required more space than the four lines allocated for each entry in my five-year diary.

The words, My Diary, are imprinted on my first diary’s aqua faux leather cover, which features an illustration of a teenaged girl and boy strolling arm in arm past a football stadium. The boy, who wears royal blue slacks and a white sweater, carries a tennis racquet. The girl, who wears white shorts, a red sweater, and chartreuse knee-highs that match her chartreuse blouse, bounces a tennis ball. They smile, serenely in love. As a girl, I found this cover illustration romantic and exotic, for I lived in an Iowa town of fewer than four hundred. We had no tennis courts, let alone a football stadium.

My first diary has a clasp with its own lock and a key. Today, however, the key has disappeared, and the clasp is held together with masking tape, not because it has worn out but because once, more than thirty years ago, a younger sibling (rumored to be my sister Linda) took our mother’s scissors and snipped the clasp of my diary. When I tell people about this desperate act, they usually gasp (unless they have done the same thing themselves). Then I hasten to mention that I could hardly hold this act against my sister because (truth be told) I used to read her diary, too. We had identical diaries; mine was blue, and Linda’s was red. We received our first diaries for Christmas in 1960, when I was ten and she was eight. My first diary entry reads: "December 24, 1960. Dear Diary, Am very happy with all my gifts. Some are Diary, Barbie Doll, nightgown, slippers, scarf, Bad Minten set, pencil sharpener, candy from Dad’s patrons on the mailroute, & perfume. All for now. –Susie" My sister’s first diary entry is a bit more somber. It reads: "December 24, 1960. Dear Diary, today I got colorforms, Barbie doll and more things. I began to get the Christmas spirit after all."

Throughout our girlhoods my sister and I shared a bedroom, and each of us kept her diary in her underwear drawer. It wasn’t unusual for us to lie on our double bed at night, writing in our diaries before putting them away, saying our prayers, and going to sleep. Sometimes we recorded daily events, noting birthdays and anniversaries along with school assignments and visits with friends. Other times we recorded our trials and tribulations. At the end of her first week of diary keeping, Linda complained: "December 30, 1960. Dear Diary, Today Kathy and Christy will come. Mommy says get up and work. You didn’t help once a week. But Mommy just makes it up. We are rilly working hard." As the new year began, Linda wrote a series of short descriptive entries that reflect events in the daily life of an eight-year-old:

January 17, 1961. Dear Diary, Today I saw a satellate out side. It looked just like a star. The satellate was called Echo.

January 18, 1961. Dear Diary, I wrote a pome in school today. Sister said it was very good.

January 19, 1961. Dear Diary, today I will get my pome up on the board by 5ed grades room. It’s very cold and I got to stay up till 10:30 because there was no school.

January 20, 1961. Dear Diary, today I am going to watch the inauguration. It begins at 10:00 and last to 3:00 this afternoon. I think she [Jacqueline Kennedy] is over done.

                    January 22, 1961. I like Frank now. Not for real!

After penning these entries, Linda stopped writing in her diary for six months; when she resumed, it was summer, and her life had a different rhythm: "July 30, 1961. Dear Diary, Today I went to Mary’s farm and got some cattails. We played with the cats and rode ponys. There dog came with us everywhere. We had a gay time in the playhouse. I plan to invite her in soon." As the next year drew to a close, Linda wrote this entry: "December 15, 1962. Dear Diary, Today Santa came to town. I got some candy and M & M’s. Also I got a apple. I was just watching Leave It to Beaver. Sandy was at her grandma’s so I went over & we had a small show. So long. Linda"

From mid-December 1962 through February 1963, Linda made no entries in her diary. She resumed writing in early March 1963 and made fourteen entries that month. Then she did not write again until late May 1963, when our family marked an important event: "May 25, 1963. Today it was Patti Ann’s, Kathy’s, and my new brother’s birthday. We (Rose V. and I) ate dinner at Pat’s house. After dinner Denny came over and told me I had a new brother. Boy was I happy. Me again, Linda"

Like my sister, I used my diary to record the same happy event: "May 25, 1963. Today, at 10:04 A.M., a baby boy was born into the Bunkers family. He was weighed in at 7 lb. 12 oz. And will be called Daniel James & Jim Klein & I will be sponsors. Our new little boy looks just like Dad & I'll be surprised if we don't start calling him ‘the little Tony.’ Mom will be able to bring Danny home next week. So till then, Ta Ta. Sue." More often, however, I used my diary as a sounding board when things were not going my way. As a twelve-year-old eager to be with friends, I sometimes complained heartily about my lot in life:

January 31, 1963. Today was the worst day of my life. Jeanie was sick so we couldn’t go to Alton. I had a chance to go to Le Mars game with Mary Mc. but I had to babysit at Angies. Linda was supposed to, but she chickened out & I was all dressed to go—but she made me go babysit because she bawled till Dad gave me Hell & called me "asshole" & made me go babysit. and what does Linda get out of it? She goes along to the farm & now it is 10:00 & I’m sitting home alone. I am sure mad at her & everyone was growlling at each other & all I got out of it is a damn good headache & a desire for revenge (which I shall get, believe me).

A year later my diary entry reflected that I was suffering from adolescent angst: "February 2, 1964. Today we will go to Worthington to visit Grandma. Nothing will happen & it will be a dull day. I just don’t care about anything anymore. I don’t have anything to live for. Last nite I cried myself to sleep. I can’t go anyplace & I planned on seeing Gary at Alton over the weekend. Why doesn’t God let me have some fun? Or good Luck? " But a week later I had recovered enough to write in my diary about what was for me a major historical event: "February 9, 1964. Today I was with Sheila, Pat & Gisela. We goofed around & watched the Beatles on T.V. Wow! I like!" The same day, Linda wrote this entry in her diary: "Dear Diary, went to Minnesota today & saw Grandma & Ray. Got home in time to see the Beatles for the first time. Paul, George, John & R I N G O." When the Beatles made their second appearance on the "Ed Sullivan Show," Linda waxed enthusiastic, even including stick-figure drawings of the lads from Liverpool as part of her diary entry: "February 16, 1964. Dear Diary, Went to Lemars today for a baptism. Got home just in time for the Beatles. Linda WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO YA YA YA"

Although we had little privacy in actuality, the ideal of privacy was important to my sister and me as we continued writing in our diaries. I kept my diary locked, and I hid the key in ingenious places, such as under the pincushion in my sewing basket. Linda, on the other hand, left her diary lying unlocked in her dresser drawer, which made it easy for me to sneak her diary off to the bathroom (the only room in our house with a door that locked) so I could browse through it. My sister had to be more enterprising if she wanted to read my diary.

Both Linda and I used the "Memoranda" sections at the back of our diaries to record special kinds of information. There Linda listed these important events in her life:

2. I received my first communion on March 23, 1960.

                     1. I was born October 23, 1952.

3. In second grade year of school I have one of the main [parts] in a play called The Little Blue Angel (I was it)

                     4. Soon I will recive Confermation.

                     5. I recived Confirmation April 25

The Memoranda section is also where Linda expressed her feelings about one of her brothers ("Denny is a baby & a dirty pig") and her friends ("Lois and Patsy and Patty Ann are my best, very best friends. Lois is my best pal and buddy forever"). In the autumn of 1963 Linda, who had just turned ten, added this bemused observation about her diary: "By hook by crook I got a mixed up book."

In the Memoranda section of my diary, I wrote an entry pointing to the future: "To my children, I started writing in this diary at the age of 10. I am 12 now and the date is Dec. 15, 1962. Some of the things I have written are crazy, but I was then too. –Suzanne (Suzy) Bunkers (now but not forever)." More important, the Memoranda section of my diary was where I could safely record my secrets. In mid-January 1963, my father’s older brother, Dick, died. My mother, pregnant with my youngest brother at the time, traveled to Minneapolis for Uncle Dick’s funeral. My father was ill with an inner ear disorder (and, as I now realize, grief stricken), and was too sick to accompany her. In my mother’s absence, I stayed home from school to take care of my father and three younger siblings. On the evening of my uncle’s death, I wrote this entry on the final Memoranda page in my diary:

Jan. 16, 1963. Today we learned that our uncle Dick Bunkers died of a heart attack in Minneapolis. No one even suspected he was sick. Granma Bunkers wrote in her letter to us that Dick would take her back to Worthington on Sunday. Dad is just sick over it. He lost his sense of balance a couple of days ago and has to stay in bed. He thought he will be well enough to go to the funeral but Dr. Murphy says no. So mom has to go. I really feel bad too, because he was so nice, and his family must not have loved him much. I hope his soul is in heaven because it should be. . . .

A few days later, after my mother had returned from Uncle Dick’s funeral and confided to me how he had actually died, I wrote a second entry and hid it on an unused page midway through my diary:

July 1 Jan. 19, 1963. Mom told me this morning that Uncle Dick committed suicide because he felt so bad because [his wife] didn't care about him. We each got one of his holy cards & I asked mom why they were given out because Dick's soul was in hell. She said that because he was so good all his life that he would suffer in purgatory for it.

As I reflect on these diary entries nearly four decades after writing them, I realize how taboo it was in our staunchly Catholic family to think about, much less write about, the subject of suicide. I couldn’t talk about my uncle’s death at St. Joseph Catholic School; our religion teacher had told us that, if a person committed suicide, his or her soul would go straight down to hell. I couldn’t even discuss the subject with my sister because my mother had warned me to keep silent. My second diary entry concluded, "So now I will try and get everyone to pray for him so he can go to heaven. I wish I could ask Mom more, but I’m afraid to. No one, not even Linda, is supposed to know how Dick died."

Later that year I wrote a series of diary entries that dealt with another, even more incomprehensible, event:

November 22, 1963. Today Pres. Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald. Funeral Monday. No skating tonite.

November 23, 1963. Long weekend ahead. No school Monday because of funeral. Everyone is really shocked & sorry.

November 24, 1963. Today we stayed home . . . Lee Oswald, Kennedy’s killer, was killed by Jack Ruby in Dallas.

November 25, 1963. Today we all stayed home & watched Kennedy’s funeral. It was so sad. All for now. . . .

December 24, 1963. I'm just sitting here writing this cause I don't know what to do with myself. It's Xmas Eve but no one is excited about it. I guess its because of Pres. Kennedy's death. We didn't send or get as any Xmas cards this year as others, & I guess that's the reason.

Yet even as I wrote the December 24, 1963, entry, my attention was not focused solely on the national tragedy of a presidential assassination. This diary entry concluded, "I can't wait till Jan. 17 for the Floyd Valley--Spalding game. I plan on seeing Gary, but I have the strangest feeling that he won't be there. I'm keeping my fingers crossed."

Looking back, I see that my sister’s and my early diaries resemble those kept by many young girls. We wrote about family and school activities, household chores, and religious devotions. We told of babysitting for neighbors’ children, weaving and selling hot pads, and starting a lucrative nightcrawler business. We wrote about squabbles with siblings, school activities, and adolescent crushes. We wrote about historical events and, on occasion, about the need to keep family secrets. Although my sister and I were keeping our diaries simultaneously, our diary entries often differed from one another in terms of themes and styles. Linda began by making short, sporadic entries in her red one-year diary during 1961. Then, like many young diarists, she used blank pages to record entries from 1962 through 1964. Her grasp of sentence structure and spelling developed as she grew from age eight to eleven and a half.

I wrote slightly longer, but just as sporadic, entries during my first year or two of diary keeping. Then, as a Christmas present in December 1962, I received my second diary–the red five-year diary. Beginning on January 1, 1963, I wrote daily entries until this five-year diary was filled and, as I mentioned earlier, I would return to the one-year diary for longer entries. Both my sister and I found ways to subvert printed diary formats, and our entries reveal that neither of us used a set formula in the practice of keeping a diary.

When I reopen my first diary, I do so carefully, not only because its pages are brittle and its cover fragile but also because it is my diary, my "safe and cherishing container," as Woodman has characterized it. Nearly forty years after I first opened the pages of that diary, I recognize the central role it played in my growing-up process, in my coming of age, in my evolving perceptions of myself and my relationships with others. Mary Pipher’s perceptive analysis of the role that journals play in the lives of girls echoes my experience: "In their writing, they can clarify, conceptualize and evaluate their experiences. Writing their thoughts and feelings strengthens their sense of self. Their journals are a place where their point of view on the universe matters" (1994, 225).

I invite you to join me in examining my diary and those of many other Midwestern American girls and women. First, we will consider the premises underlying this anthology. Next, we will look into frequently asked questions about the diary and consider useful frameworks for studying diaries as life writing. Then we will examine themes common to many of the diaries in this collection, and we will note editorial principles for this book. Finally, we will read excerpts from the diaries themselves. As we set out on this journey, I hope you will keep in mind the lighthearted (and helpful) advice that Jessica Wilber, an adolescent diarist and author, offers to novice diarists: "Remember that there are only two rules for keeping a diary:

1. Date every entry, and 2. Don’t make any more rules" (1996, 4).

* * * * * * * *

My study of diaries kept by girls and women living in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota since the mid-nineteenth century has resulted in this anthology of selections from forty-six diaries. My purpose is twofold: to explore the ways in which diaries can document the diverse experiences of individuals and families, and to understand the ways in which diaries have functioned as forms of life writing. I draw on the metaphor of the sampler, which is appropriate for several reasons. First, the term sampler can refer to a decorative piece of needlework that usually has letters or verses embroidered on it in various stitches as an example of the stitcher’s skill. The word comes from the Latin word exemplum, meaning something that serves as a pattern for imitation or record. The word found its way into English via the French word exemplaire, meaning model, pattern, copy, specimen. Girls and women in many cultural settings have created samplers, and the sampler found its way into early American life as a demonstration of various stitches, designs, and motifs that girls and women could study and then imitate in future sewing tasks. It is no coincidence that women and girls created most samplers because they traditionally have done the sewing and fine stitchery in their families. As a form of material culture, girls and women typically designed and preserved samplers as evidence of their skill..

Today the word sampler has additional connotations. One can buy a Whitman’s Chocolates Sampler or send a Wisconsin Cheese House Sampler as a holiday gift. Sampler is also used to represent part or a single item from a larger whole or group. The term can refer to the person doing the collecting, as in one who collects or examines samples, and it can be used to refer to that which has been collected, that is, the sample. All these definitions apply to the selections from diaries that appear in this anthology. The act of keeping a diary involves the sampling of one’s experiences, followed by the selection of particular details and the shaping of each diary entry. The act of editing a diary, whether it be one’s own diary or another person’s, involves sampling diary entries, then selecting particular entries, often for an edition or a collection such as this.

Over the years several questions have guided my study of diaries: Why do diaries have such staying power? What makes them appealing to writers young and old? What can diaries help us appreciate about the lives and experiences of those individuals who kept them? What can diaries tell us, not only about why individuals write in diaries but also about why they (and others) preserve those diaries and make them available for others to read and appreciate? Although I do not claim that this collection will provide definitive answers to these questions, I hope that it will open the door for further study of the issues they raise.

What is a diary? When I began my research, I made a distinction between the diary as a form for recording events and the journal as a form for introspection, reflection, and the expression of feelings. Like many others, I have found this to be an artificial distinction, both as the result of my research and as the result of my own diary keeping. I found as many kinds of diaries as diarists: a diary might be kept in a cloth-bound book with lock and key, but it might just as easily be kept in a spiral notebook, looseleaf paper, or on the back sides of envelopes. A diary entry might be a brief one-line report of events, such as those entries found in diaries kept by Maranda J. Cline or Ruby Butler Ahrens. A diary entry might contain a five-page analysis of one’s beliefs, attitudes, and desires, such as those entries found in diaries kept by Sarah Jane Kimball, Emily Quiner, or Ada James. A diarist might write daily entries, as Lillian Carpenter did; a diarist might write periodic entries, as Martha Furgerson Nash did; or a diarist might write sporadic entries, as Maria Morton Merrill did.

Diaries also reflect different kinds of authorship. Some diaries, like those of Mary Griffith and Elspeth Close, have individual authors and appear to have been written for the diarist alone. Some diaries, like those of Sarah Gillespie and Ada James, also tell us that the diarist permitted certain family members (Sarah’s mother, Ada’s cousin) to read entries in the diaries. The Hamilton and Holton family diaries illustrate multiple authorship of diary entries over years and generations. The Chronicle of the School Sisters of Notre Dame as well as the Annals of the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis illustrate the communal, or group, diary--written as a community record and preserved in community archives. It bears repeating: we find as many kinds of diaries as we do diarists.

A growing scholarly interest in the diary has resulted in a number of critical studies that explore the nature of the diary. Rebecca Hogan analyzes the diary as a "text composed of ‘fragments’ which nevertheless flow continually through the days," creating a text that "is by its very nature open-ended, unfinished and incomplete, in come cases ending only with the life of the writer" (1991, 100). She describes the diary as a "paratactic form" [a string of clauses without connectives] that is "both repetitive and cumulative, each entry discrete (and discreet), and each entry an addition to the flow of days" (100). Finally, Hogan defines two kinds of parataxis in the diary: the "even, horizontal, metonymic flow of events and entries into the diary" that creates its continuity, and the "series of related items, events and entries without the use of connecting links" that creates the sense of "discrete, separate entries’ (104).

The concept of dailiness is useful in characterizing the diary’s form, especially when taken in the sense that Bettina Aptheker uses it:

By the dailiness of women’s lives I mean the patterns women create and the meanings women invent each day and over time as a result of their labors and in the context of their subordinated status to men. The point is not to describe every aspect of daily life or to represent a schedule of priorities in which some activities are more important or accorded more status than others. The point is to suggest a way of knowing from the meanings women give to their labors. The search for dailiness is a method of work that allows us to take the patterns women create and the meanings women invent and learn from them. If we map what we learn, connecting one meaning or invention to another, we begin to lay out a different way of seeing reality (1989, 39).

In her recent in-depth study of the diaries of six nineteenth-century American women, Amy Wink defines the paradox inherent in the diary: "Because the diary is, when we read it, a completed work, it can be comprehended as a whole. However, it is only by recognizing the significance of each individual moment of writing that the larger frame may be understood; conversely, it is in seeing the whole text, the life represented, that the individual moments show their importance. What we read is as complex as the chambered nautilus turning upon itself until its opening" (1996, 14). Margo Culley emphasizes the importance of the diary as text--a verbal construct characterized by the "process of selection and arrangement of detail," one that uses such literary strategies as "questions of audience (real or implied), narrative, shape and structure, persona, voice, imagistic and thematic repetition, and what James Olney calls ‘metaphors of self’" (1985, 10).

Kathryn Carter, whose recent work on unpublished diary manuscripts confirms their importance as a form of life writing for Canadian women, 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" (1997, 20). In examining not only the material conditions of diarists’ writing 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" (21).

What makes the diary so intriguing to readers? I believe that the diary’s appeal can be traced to its expansiveness and flexibility. The diary can incorporate a variety of writing styles; it can range from being formal and stylized to conversational and idiomatic. The diary can envelop a variety of themes; for example, the need for self-affirmation, the conflict between duty and desire, the quest for knowledge, the wish to make one’s mark on the world, the coming to terms with change and loss. Because it is expansive and flexible, the diary can be studied simultaneously as a historical document, a therapeutic tool, and a form of literature. The diary can provide valuable insights into individuals’ self-images, the dynamics of families and communities, and the kinds of contributions that individuals have made, past and present. The form and content of a diary are inevitably shaped not only by its writer’s personality but also by her experience of race, ethnicity, class, age, sexual orientation, and geographical setting. Circumstances influence both what a diarist writes and when and why she writes–and what she does not write.

Themes in diaries

What kinds of themes appear in diaries? Six primary themes, often overlapping and interlocking, appear in the diaries of Midwestern girls and women in this collection:

1. The need to view the use of one’s time and energies as worthwhile. As I have noted elsewhere, "it might, of course, be argued that simply by recording her activities, any writer asserts the belief that what one does is important, yet the tone of many of these diaries and journals reveals that their writers felt the need to explain their activities in detail, not so much as a means of filling pages but as a way of justifying to themselves that they were using their time well and that their activities were appreciated by others" (1988, 195). For instance, Abbie T. Griffin’s diary entries often detail all the sewing and embroidery work she completed on a given day, whereas Maria Morton Merrill’s diary entries outline farm tasks such as threshing, harvesting oats and potatoes, and butchering hogs. In their diaries Emily Quiner and Agnes Barland McDaniel catalogue the daily work of the nurse; Pauline Petersen describes the work of a teacher; Maud Hart Lovelace tracks her work as a writer; Lillian Carpenter describes the difficulties of getting and keeping a job during the Great Depression.

2. The need for meaningful connections with other human beings. For many the diary becomes a place where they can write about relationships with others, thereby validating themselves as members of families and communities. Often this need for meaningful connections leads a diarist to fashion a text that members of her family or community, as well as future generations, can read. Speculating on the role that keeping a diary may have played in the life of her husband’s grandmother, Marion Merrill asks, "Could it be that some of Maria’s loneliness and critical nature, that are shown in the words of the diary, resulted from finding little companionship in the community and from being cut off from those she would have enjoyed, because her illness made it impossible for her to maintain ties with neighbors?" (personal correspondence, 1987). Like the diary of Maria Morton Merrill, the diaries of Sarah Pratt, Sarah Gillespie, Sarah Jane Kimball, and Carol Johnson illustrate how the diary can help the diarist recognize and perhaps fulfill this need for meaningful relationships. In many cases, as a diarist continues to write, her diary itself becomes a trusted friend and confidante. Emily Quiner’s final entry, for instance, addresses the central role that her diary has played in her life for more than two-and-a-half years: "It is true, soon I shall bid you adieu faithful friend, after having gone in your company for nearly two years and a half laying you away among the relics of my dead past, no more to look upon your pages, save as reminders of what I have been as chronicled, in you, and what I shall be no more forever."

3. The need for an outlet for intense emotions like grief and anger, emotions not usually deemed appropriate for public expression, particularly by a female. At times the diary functions as a friend or confidante whom the writer can trust with her innermost feelings and secrets at turning points in her life. In Opening Up, James W. Pennebaker examines the question of whether writing in a diary can help an individual come to terms with emotions that might otherwise be inhibited or repressed. He explains that not every diarist uses that medium for the expression of deep emotions. In acknowledging the selectivity and shaping that are part of the diarist’s process, Pennebaker observes: "Among the people I have interviewed who have kept intimate and emotional diaries, two distinctly different patterns have emerged in the ways they maintain their diaries. One group–of which I am a member–only writes during periods of stress of unhappiness. If life is plodding along in a fairly predictable way, people in this group simply have no interest in writing. The second group, which is less than half the size of the first, writes almost daily. That is, until traumas strike. During massive stressors, people in this group stop writing" (1990, 192-193). Such is the case with the diaries of Margaret Vedder Holdredge, who writes of her loneliness in her husband’s absence; Martha Smith Brewster, who grieves the death of her young son; Gertrude Cairns, who recounts the details of her physical and emotional collapse and recovery; and Sandra Gens, who grieves the death of her father.

4. The need for a forum for commentary on religion, politics, and world events. Contrary to popular myth, midwestern girls and women have not been isolated and unaware of world events; in fact, many have used their diaries to express strong opinions on social, political, and religious/spiritual issues, as well as the ways in which such issues are intertwined. Entries in the diaries of Eliza and J. Talmai Hamilton, Edythe Miller, Gwendolyn Wilson Fowler, and Martha Furgerson Nash, among others, illustrate the ways in which the diary can provide a safe place for expressing such points of view.

5. The need to launch a quest that may involve leaving the home or the homeland, going out into the larger world, and making one’s way there. Isabella McKinnon’s diary, which recounts the story of her family’s emigration from Scotland to Wisconsin, illustrates this theme, as do Jane F. Grout’s diary of her family’s migration from Wisconsin to Minnesota, Alice Gortner Johnson’s diary of her trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and Ruth Van Horn Zuckerman’s diary of her and her husband’s travels in England. Sometimes the diarist launches a quest without ever leaving her home as she searches for self-identity. Along with many others in this collection, the diaries of Sarah Jane Kimball, Sarah Gillespie, Ada James, and Gertrude Cairns–all kept throughout their writers’ lifetimes–illustrate the central role that the quest plays in girls’ and women’s diaries and lives.

6. The need for a vehicle for sending specific messages to one’s intended audience, especially when the diarist expects others to read her diary. The Chronicle of the School Sisters of Notre Dame and the Annals of the Sisters of St. Francis fulfill such a function because in each case the diarist knew that what she wrote would become part of the archival records of her religious order and might be read by others as well. Similarly, the Hamilton and Holton family diaries, written to record the history of several individuals within a family unit, illustrate the ways in which a diary can serve as a vehicle for transmitting family history and values from one generation to another.

What does a reader of diaries need to keep in mind? I need to consider the range of interpretations that an encoded text can yield. I also need to note that what is not said in a diary entry can be every bit as important as what is said and that shaping and selection are integral to the diarist’s task. In Read This Only to Yourself, her influential study of the letters and diaries of North Dakota women, Elizabeth Hampsten puts it this way: "[P]rivate writings of women ask of us, if we wish to read them knowingly, a special inventive patience. We must interpret what is not written as well as what is, and, rather than dismiss repetitions, value them especially. ‘Nothing happened’ asks that we wonder what, in the context of a particular woman’s stream of days, she means by something happening" (4).

In her recent study of the diary, Alexandra Johnson reinforces the importance of this view: "Invisible sentences, blank spaces, a line suddenly breaking off. Often these are a diary’s most intriguing places, the spot where the eye lingers longest" (107). By attending to what is not there as well as what is, a diligent reader can easily dispel the stereotype of the diary as a series of fragmented, haphazard scribbles. Diaries are forms in which their writers’ exacting work cannot always be seen. This does not mean, however, that selection, shaping, and structuring have played no role in their creation. As I have noted elsewhere, many diaries are so skillfully "invisibly mended," to use Jane Marcus’s phrase, that only a very close reading can reveal what Elaine Showalter has called "ragged edges"–those bits and pieces that defy tidy inclusion in traditional literary schema (1993, 245). To become a careful reader of diaries, one must scrutinize the physical formats of diaries as well as the kinds of entries they contain.

What about privacy and secrecy in a diary? Although the diary has traditionally been viewed as a "private" rather than a "public" text, actual diaries reveal that this is a false dichotomy and that the diary is often both public and private. For many midwestern girls and women writing since 1850, 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, the writers often intended to share these texts with family members and/or close friends. Ada James shared her diary with her cousin Ada Briggs; in fact, the two young women periodically exchanged and read one another’s diaries, then wrote "prophecies" for the coming year in them. Sometimes a diary functioned as a collaborative text, with more than one person writing in it, or with one family member (often a female) writing what was intended as a family chronicle as well as an artifact of material culture to be read and treasured by successive generations. The Hamilton and Holton family diaries illustrate this type of communal text, as do the chronicles/annals kept by orders of women religious. In his work on the Holocaust diary, David Patterson explains that it is "characterized by the human being’s effort to bring the soul to life through an engagement with the self, not just to get in touch with one’s feelings but to establish some contact with a truth that may sustain the life of the soul" (1997, 37). According to Patterson, the Holocaust diarist, who "writes at the risk of incurring grave dangers," senses "a necessity to write" and has a stake in creating a text that "goes beyond a concern for inner equilibrium to include a communal salvation–or, failing that, a testimony to and for the sake of the life of a human community" (37). Because the form is so flexible and adaptable in terms of purpose and audience, the diary occupies a unique place in literature and history as a text that can be both personal and communal.

What characterizes the narrative structure of the diary? Like many other forms of narrative, a diary tells a story; unlike other forms, however, a diary need not be plot driven. Many diaries 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" (1993, 57). Some publishers and readers, however, expect that diaries, like fictional narratives, must be plot driven to have literary merit, an expectation that can result in its being forced into a traditional narrative frame, with an artificial emphasis on "literariness" to the exclusion of other concerns. The problem, as Kathryn Carter explains, is this: "The concept of a literary tradition fits uncomfortably with diary writing because it implies literary motivations and standards which are erroneously applied to the writing found in diaries. Holding diaries up to literary criteria not only diminishes our understanding of their writing, it also serves to limit the range of diary writings made public"(in press, 7).

Judy Nolte Lensink 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 defines three criteria often that publishers often deem necessary for gauging the potential worth of a manuscript diary: plot, setting, and character. She 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" (1989, 77).

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. Based on my work with unpublished manuscript diaries, I can affirm that most do not follow a traditional narrative pattern. Rather, a diary reflects its writer’s sense of purpose and audience as well as its writer’s choice of narrative strategies (e.g., characterization, setting, dialogue) appropriate to purpose and audience. When pondering the ways in which diarists use diverse formats and narrative structures in their texts, I am mindful of what artist and writer Wanda Gag wrote in one volume of her adolescent diary, as she reached its final pages on September 18, 1909: "Poor diary; nearly done with you, am I not? I’d write piles but I have to save space, because I’d hate to quit writing for a time and I don’t know whether I can get another book right away (1984, 33-34).

How might cultural mores influence diary writing? Since the mid-nineteenth century, many diarists have witnessed and recorded stages in the evolution of cultural norms, expectations, and opportunities for girls and women. Many diaries have served as "staging areas" from which diarists can question as well as conform to gender roles. For instance, in her diary, which she kept from 1876 to1880, Blanche Brackenridge, an adolescent from Rochester, Minnesota, listed what she called "Knife and Fork Flirtations" in a playful yet subversive look at "ladylike" behavior.

Like Blanche Brackenridge, many diarists in this anthology used their diaries to acquiesce to and rebel against such culture-bound notions as the "doctrine of separate spheres" and the "cult of true womanhood," which scholars now acknowledge are complicated by issues of race, class, sexuality, age, region, religion, and other variables. Carol Coburn and Martha Smith, authors of Spirited Lives, explain that the doctrine of "separate spheres" and the "cult of domesticity" were cultural directives that had only limited applicability in the lives of women religious: "Although historically almost invisible, American sisters were some of the best educated and most publicly active women of their time. Talented and ambitious women from working-class and middle-class backgrounds, regardless of ethnicity, advanced to teaching, nursing, administration, and other leadership positions in Catholic religious communities" (1999, 3). Coburn and Smith add that, like many other American women, "nuns also utilized religious traditions and symbols to subvert gender limitations and expand their possibilities" (81). Cathy N. Davidson refers to the "metaphoric and explanatory nature of the separate spheres" because, as she explains, it has never been clear to her "that these spheres actually existed in anything like a general, definitive, or, for that matter, ‘separate’ way in nineteenth-century America or that they existed in America any more than in other countries or in the nineteenth century more than in earlier centuries" (445). Davidson continues, "[T]he binaric version of nineteenth-century American history is ultimately unsatisfactory because it is simply too crude an instrument–too rigid and totalizing–for understanding the different, complicated ways that nineteenth-century American society of literary production functioned" (445).

How does the diary function as both text and artifact? Diaries are things--artifacts of material culture as well as texts. As Kathryn Carter explains, "Diaries foreground the material conditions of their making and thereby locate the writer as a bodily presence in a particular time and place . . . Like a photo album or a scrapbook, the diary is the material trace of a human attempting to place herself in the context of her immediate culture" (in press, 32-33). When a diary is considered from this dual perspective–as text and as artifact--a thorough exploration requires not only analyzing individual diary entries but also analyzing the size and shape of the diary in an effort to determine how its physical format might have influenced what was or was not written and how it was or was not written. It means examining entries in a five-year diary that refuse to stay within the four tiny lines allotted to them to determine why the diarist might have needed to circumvent the prescribed diary format. It means considering how the use of statements such as "I was unwell today" (which could mean "I had the flu today" but which could also mean "I was having my menstrual period today" or "I was in labor, about to deliver a baby today") simultaneously affirm and subvert notions of "domesticity" and "femininity." It means attending to how all sorts of "ragged edges" might offer clues about the diarist, her writing process, her intended audience, and the purpose(s) for which her text was written. It means "no longer starting from the assumption that I am working with ‘odds and ends,’ ‘fragments,’ bits and pieces’ of women’s experiences–everything that has traditionally been relegated to the dustbin of mankind’s experiences." It also means that "as I read and interpret forms of women’s ‘private’ writing, I choose interpretive pieces; and I cut and shape them–arranging them into intricate, carefully wrought designs, both consciously and unconsciously" (Bunkers, 1993, 217).

Why is it worthwhile to study diaries from this three-state area? This anthology is not the first collection to include excerpts from diaries by girls and women; several scholarly and popular studies have to varying degrees included such excerpts. With the exception of Glenda Riley (who has studied Iowa women) and Elizabeth Hampsten (who has studied North Dakota women), these studies have focused on the writings of English women, American women in the eastern and southern United States, as well as women on the Overland Trail and in the American West. Moreover, the primary emphasis in some collections has actually been on retrospective life writing (e.g., memoirs and reminiscences) rather than on diaries. Recent diary anthologies include the following: Margo Culley’s A Day at a Time (1985), a collection of excerpts from the published diaries of twenty-nine American women, 1764 to 1985; Penelope Franklin’s Private Pages (1986), a collection of excerpts from the diaries of thirteen American girls and women, 1832 to1979; Steven Kagle’s Late 19^th Century American Diary Literature (1988), a study of the diaries of twenty-six Americans, nine of whom are women; and Blodgett’s Capacious Hold-all (1991), a collection of excerpts from the published diaries of thirty English women, 1571-1970. Daniel Halpern’s collection, Our Private Lives: (1988), includes excerpts from the texts of thirty-nine "accomplished writers of prose and/or poetry," ten of whom are women (5). Charlotte Cole’s collection, Between You and Me (1998), includes excerpts from the personal diaries and letters of young British women who have gone on to become successful writers. As these anthologies indicate, there is clearly a need for this collection, which contributes to the published literature on diaries of girls and women and which focuses specifically on diaries written by girls and women living in the three midwestern states of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. To date, insufficient attention has been paid to manuscript diaries kept by girls and women in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, three midwestern states where social, political, and geographic change has been swift and pervasive. Iowa became a state in 1846; Wisconsin followed two years later in 1848; and Minnesota joined the Union a decade after that, in 1858. In each state, changing demographics have been a function of communities formed and opportunities available (or not available) to individuals and groups. Many girls and women in my sample were born in one of these states; some arrived with their families; others came on their own and supported themselves as teachers, nurses, and domestic workers. Scores of their descendants continue to live in the midwestern United States today.

Factors that have especially influenced the demographics in these three states include, but are not limited to, the pre- and post-Civil War influx of European immigrants; the post-Civil War migration of African Americans to the Midwest, particularly to larger cities (Milwaukee, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Des Moines, Waterloo) in the three-state region; the forced "removal" of members of Native American nations from western Wisconsin as well as from most of Minnesota and Iowa to reservations in the Nebraska and Dakota Territories; the emphasis on attaining suffrage and property rights for white women; the effects on individuals and family units of wars and economic depressions; and the social and political movements of the mid-to-late twentieth century. While I do not assert that the three states of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota constitute a special geographic or cultural region, I believe that diaries describing the lives of girls and women in the three-state region can contribute to a broader perspective on what is called "midwestern life." After all, not everyone in this part of the world was (or is) living in a little house on the prairie.

What kinds of diaries have I included in this collection? Quite a variety. Some were kept by girls and women who have died and whose families kept their diaries or donated them to historical society archives. A number of modern diaries remain in the possession of the diarists. Several of these contemporary diaries are kept by diarists who know me and who, as the result of our acquaintance, have developed a trust in my ability to present their diary excerpts accurately and empathetically. My intent in compiling this collection has been to create a sampler, not to complete a scientific study. Subjectivity and empathy have been and continue to be cornerstones of my work. As I have noted elsewhere, "My work on women’s ‘private’ diaries and journals does not take place in a vacuum. It occurs within the context of my own daily journal keeping, my own letter writing. It occurs within the context of enduring and not-so-enduring relationships, changes in daily responsibilities, alterations in mind-set and habit" (1993, 219).

Since 1985, when I began to collect diaries for this book, I have made several modifications and refinements in my initial research plan. During the early stages, I planned to limit the scope of this book to diaries written from approximately 1840 to1900 and already donated to historical society archives. As my study continued, however, I recognized the arbitrary nature of that plan. Twentieth-century diaries by midwestern American girls and women are equally as compelling and revealing as those by nineteenth-century diarists. For this reason I expanded the collection to include a number of recent, even contemporary, diaries. Moreover, many girls and women who began their diaries during the late nineteenth century continued writing in their diaries into the twentieth century (e.g., Maranda J. Cline and Ada L. James). Some diaries were begun in one geographical setting and completed in a different setting (e.g., the diaries of Sarah Pratt, Isabella McKinnon, and Gwendolyn Wilson Fowler). Several diaries were begun by girls and became lifelong autobiographical enterprises (e.g., the diaries of Sarah Jane Kimball, Sarah Gillespie, and Gertrude Cairns). All these realizations required that I expand my initial plan. The result is, I believe, a larger and richer collection than I had first anticipated.

Whose diaries are included in this collection? I found that the girl or woman most likely to have kept a diary in the years since 1850 was a third-, fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-generation Euro-American with adequate economic resources and some access to education. Several diaries in this collection were written by girls and women who had the time and resources accorded by family wealth and white privilege (e.g., Etta Call, Gertrude Cairns, Margaret Vedder Holdredge). At the same time, a number of the diaries were written by white working-class girls and women (e.g., Jennie Andrews, Abbie Griffin, Lillian Carpenter); one diary was written by a Euro-American immigrant (Isabella McKinnon) and another by the daughter (Pauline Petersen) of two immigrants. Two diaries (those by Gwendolyn Wilson Fowler and Martha Furgerson Nash) were written by middle-class African American women. Poor and wealthy farm girls and women (Sarah Gillespie Huftalen, Jane F. Grout, Antoinette Porter King, Jennie Andrews, Ruby Butler Ahrens), a group that has traditionally defied categorization by class, wrote several of the diaries.

Whose diaries have been saved and preserved, either privately by family members or publicly in historical society archives? Whether a girl’s or woman’s diary was saved and deemed worthy of inclusion in historical society archives, I found, often depended not on who the diarist was but on whose mother, wife, daughter, or sister she was. Several diaries that I have studied (e.g., those by Emily Quiner, Gertrude Cairns, Dorothea Barland, Agnes Barland McDaniel) are not catalogued under the diarist’s name but under the name of the family of which she was a member. Certainly, the politics and procedures of manuscript acquisition, cataloguing, and accessibility have constituted an important concern in my research and have led to my determination to make little-known diaries by midwestern girls and women more readily available to teachers, students, and the general reading public. That is one reason I have included several diaries (such as those of Ruby Butler Ahrens, Ruth Van Horn Zuckerman, Carol Johnson, and Sandra Gens) that remain in the possession of family members, friends, or the diarists themselves.

What is useful about studying today’s as well as yesterday’s diaries? A new strand of my research is the study of diaries being kept right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The growing popularity of diary keeping among adolescent girls has resulted not only from their writers’ wider access to historical diaries but also from the introduction of diary/journal writing to elementary and middle-school curricula. This collection includes excerpts from the diaries of seven girls who kept diaries during the 1990s. Some excerpts are intensely introspective, while others are descriptive and/or analytical. While not intended to present a comprehensive picture, these seven diaries by midwestern American girls provide timely glimpses into the world of today’s adolescents.

Today diaries can be found not only in libraries and archives but also in restaurants and coffee shops. Consider, for instance, the "Coffee Hag" in Mankato, Minnesota, where the proprietors, Patti Ruskey and Lisa Coons, set out blank notebooks in which customers are encouraged to write down their thoughts. For several years customers have filled volumes of these communal texts, penning observations on daily life, love and friendship, social and political issues, and even service ("I wish the Coffee Hag was open on Mondays. That’s when I need my caffeine the most!"). The volumes of the "Hag Bible," as it is called, are lying on tables, and customers are invited to read and/or write (or sketch) as much or as little as they wish. After penning an entry on June 24, 1999, one customer added, "Thanks for being my journal for the day."

The recent explosion of communication via electronic media has resulted in hundreds of diaries being kept on the World Wide Web. When one analyzes what it means to keep one’s diary on the Web, thereby making each entry accessible to a potentially huge international readership, reconceptualizing the diary and the act of diary keeping itself becomes even more important. Questions of purpose and audience inevitably become far more complex. Why? Because time-worn assumptions that the diary is being kept only for the diarist and that it is an intensely secretive and private enterprise are unworkable when exploring the phenomenon of the online diary. "Gingko," who lives in Brookfield, Wisconsin, keeps her diary on line: "Dreaming Among the Jade Clouds," is at > When I asked her how she began keeping a diary on line and what motivates her to do it that way, she replied: "I saw a journal an online friend had and figured that if she could do it, so could I. At that point I'd been completely unaware of the large number of online journals in existence and thought people might think me rather strange for doing it, but the idea of keeping a journal in a digital medium fascinated me, and it seemed like a cool way to share my journal with friends again without having to mess with the post office. Because I've always loved including images in my journals and because my handwriting is truly atrocious, an html journal struck me as the ultimate blank notebook. (That ‘ultimate blank notebook’ was the main reason for starting it, and it seemed to make sense to use it on my website instead of keeping it hidden just for myself on my hard drive)." All Web sites above were last accessed on 15 August 2000.

Since the mid-1970s, we have seen an intensive reexamination of the lives and writings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American girls and women. Central to this reexamination is the acknowledgment that autobiographical texts can offer one of the most reliable sources of information about what individuals’ lives were like and how individuals viewed themselves, their relationships with others, and their experiences. Clearly, the traditional definition of autobiography as a "coherent shaping of the past," offered by Roy Pascal in 1960, has proved inadequate because it has failed to take into account such forms as the diary, letter, memoir, and personal essay–all forms of autobiography commonly used by girls and women. Contemporary theoreticians in the burgeoning field of life studies emphasize the need to cast a wider net when studying forms of life writing, and the examination of diaries is a central part of the formulation of a more inclusive and useful definition of autobiography.

The intersections of poststructuralist literary theory, feminist theory, social history, and ethnographic theory continue to shape theoretical frameworks for studying the diary as a form of life writing and add texture to questions posed earlier in this introductory essay. Marlene Kadar defines contemporary life writing as a evolving continuum influenced by the reader's as well as the writer's perspectives: "Life writing comprises texts that are written by an author who does not continuously write about someone else, and who also does not pretend to be absent from the [black, brown, or white] text himself/herself. Life writing is a way of seeing, to use John Berger's famous phrase" (1992, 10). According to Kadar, life writing can present simple or complex narratives and subvert traditional narrative strategies. The goal of the life writer is to minimize distance between writer and reader. The diarist often crosses generic boundaries and disciplines, with the result that life writing becomes "the playground for new relationships both within and without the text, and most important, it is the site of new language and new grammars" (152).

Like Kadar, Liz Stanley emphasizes experimentation in contemporary life writing, underscoring the ways a writer's and theorist's concern with the details of particular lives debunks the notion that there is one version of Woman’s Life and Experience. Stanley continues: "Both biography and autobiography lay claim to facticity, yet both are by nature artful enterprises which select, shape, and produce a very unnatural product, for no life is lived quite so much under a single spotlight as the conventional form of written auto/biographies suggests" (1992, 3-4). By emphasizing the selective nature of what is included and what is excluded, Stanley highlights the necessary role of narrative conventions as well as experimentation with such conventions: "A concern with auto/biography shows that ‘self’ is a fabrication, not necessarily a lie but certainly a highly complex truth: a fictive truth reliant on cultural convention concerning what ‘a life’ consists of and how its story can be told both in speech and, somewhat differently, in writing" (243).

Along with Liz Stanley, Evelyn Hinz uses the term auto/biography to describe a text that is both biography and autobiography. The appeal of auto/biography today, explains Hinz, "is best understood through an awareness of its ritual nature and in terms of how it answers to spiritual needs: the need for role models who inspire feelings of 'pity and fear' by reason of the limited stage upon which they perform, the need to face mortality and the need to establish a living connection with the past" (1992, 209).

Leigh Gilmore uses the term autobiographics to describe both a process of self-representation and a reading practice that focuses on "interruptions and eruptions, with resistance and contradiction as strategies of self-representation" (1994, 42). This term highlights "those elements that mark a location in a text where self-invention, self-discovery, and self-representation emerge within the technologies of autobiography" (42). Gilmore acknowledges that there is a subject in the text, not a simple nor a unified one, but an evolving one.

As a form of life writing, the diary crosses that often-blurred (and sometimes imaginary) border between the public and the private, the literary and the historical. The diary also crosses generic boundaries and, although it is not bound by gender, the diary provides an especially congenial form of personal narrative for girls and women. The diary offers a prime illustration of what Susan Stanford Friedman and others refer to as "border talk" (1998, 3). Friedman explains, "Borders have a way of insisting on separation at the same time as they acknowledge connection . . . borders also specify the liminal space in between, the interstitial site of interaction, interconnection, and exchange" (3).

Recent editions of women’s diaries affirm what diary scholars have been asserting for years: the diary often functions as a form of autobiography for its writer. Constance Fulmer and Margaret Barfield’s Autobiography of a Shirtmaker (1998) the diary of Edith J. Simcox (1844-1901), tells the story of an independent Victorian woman who was a businesswoman, social reformer, scholar, and journalist –and who kept a detailed diary from 1876 to 1900. Marcus Rosenbaum’s Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman (1998) is the diary of his grandmother, Helen Jacobus Apte. Julia Hornbostel’s A Good and Caring Woman (1996) draws extensively on the diaries of Frances Cornelia (Nellie) Norton Tallman (1839-1924), who lived in Janesville, Wisconsin, and whose twenty volumes of manuscript diaries tell the story of her family and community. Vladimir A. Kozlov and Vladimir M. Khrustalev’s The Last Diary of Tsaritsa Alexandra (1997) reproduces the recently declassified 1918 diary of Alexandra Fyodorovna, the last Tsaritsa of Russia. Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 (1998) is an English translation of the secret diaries, kept in German, by a Jewish professor of Romance languages who lived through the war in Dresden, Germany.

In the prelude to Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (1998), James Olney explores the question of what to call the kinds of writing that he has spent decades reading and analyzing. Olney muses, "Although I have in the past written frequently about autobiography as a literary genre, I have never been very comfortable doing it, primarily because I believe that if one is to speak relevantly of a genre one has first of all to define it, and I have never met a definition of autobiography that I could really like" (xv). Drawing on a term used by Count Gian Artico di Porcia in his "Proposal to the Scholars of Italy" in the early 1700s, Olney explains:

What I like about the term ‘periautography,’ which would mean ‘writing about or around the self,’ is precisely its indefinition and lack of generic rigor, its comfortably loose fit and generous adaptability, and the same for ‘life-writing’ . . . For by whatever name we call the literature–autobiography, life-writing, or periautography–there exists a particularly intriguing kind of writing, to be considered for which any one of the terms mentioned might be a fair enough designation, the crucial tactic, in my view, being not to insist on strict definitions and rigid lines of demarcation" (xvi).

Perhaps the concept of the diary as periautography is an idea whose time has come.

My objective in editing this collection has been to produce a clear, readable text that reproduces as accurately as possible the original selections from each diary and that interferes as little as possible with the reader’s interaction with each diary. Toward this end, I have relied on the following editorial principles:

1. I have retained the original spelling used by each diarist, with the exception of correcting a few misspellings that appear to have been the result of a slip of the pen and which are words that the diarist has consistently spelled correctly elsewhere in her text.

2. I have retained the original punctuation and capitalization used by each diarist, including the use of dashes in lieu of commas or periods and the use of lowercase letters at the beginning of sentences.

3. I have used ellipses at the end of an entry to denote the deletion of one or more entire entries. I have used ellipses within an entry to denote the deletion of a portion of a specific diary entry.

4. I have consistently dated each entry by month, day, and year, placing this information directly before each diary entry.

5. I have used brackets within diary entries to clarify dates and to note illegible words. Information that appears in brackets between diary entries represents my effort to interpolate biographical information necessary to an understanding of the text.

6. To minimize disruptions of the diarist’s text and keep the focus on the diary itself, I have usually not intervened to define terms or add surnames of individuals mentioned in each diary.

7. A brief biographical and thematic sketch, based on archival and family records, precedes the excerpts from each diarist.

In her introduction to A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich muses: "Opening a diary for the first time is like walking into a room full of strangers. The reader is advised to enjoy the company without trying to remember every name" (1990, 15). As a reader and editor of diaries, I have appreciated Thatcher’s observation as I have pondered how to select and present selections from the forty-six individuals’ diaries included here. First, given that none of the diaries in this collection is presented in its entirety, I have had to consider how much of each diarist’s story could be told through the excerpts that I had chosen. At the heart of my consideration is this question: 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.

Instead, each chapter presents selections from, or moments in, a wide range of diaries. I have selected examples that I believe demonstrate the range of each diarist’s interests and feelings and that will give readers a good feel for the overall nature of the entire diary. At the same time I ask readers to remember that no excerpt from a diarist’s work is intended to represent either an entire diary or an entire life.

And now, the diaries themselves. As you journey through this collection, the voices of individual diarists may delight, move, puzzle, and/or exasperate you. If so, this collection will have accomplished its purpose.