Even in a diary as minimal as the one kept by Maranda J. Cline, patterns emerge.  Her spelling and punctuation were irregular, reflecting the lack of formal education to which most nineteenth-century rural American women had access when they were girls.  During the last month of her life, Maranda  J. Cline kept up her interest in community activities, recording several in her diary.  More important, she continued caring for her family.  The blank spaces for the days immediately preceding her death are then explained by her daughter, Bertie, who recorded the death of her mother and the transfer in ownership of the diary by writing: “I came posessor of Mothers dira Jan. 23, 1907.”   The dividing of Maranda’s possessions and the sale of her house and goods marked not only the conclusion of her life but also the conclusion of her diary. 

            How much of the diarist’s story is written in her diary is a critical question to be explored by those who study diaries.   In my introduction to Diaries of Girls and Women: a Midwestern American Sampler (2001), I ask, “Can any diary, edited or unexpurgated, tell the whole story about an individual's life?”  When I began editing The Diary of Caroline Seabury, 1854-1863 (1991), fifteen years 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 Seabury 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 at the Columbus Female Institute in the fall of 1854, her younger sister Martha joined her in Columbus. The sisters chose a leather-bound notebook and recorded their intention of keeping 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 in diary entries by stories of human beings beaten and sold from one slave owner to another.   Martha Seabury, having fallen victim to the family disease of consumption (tuberculosis), died in 1858, leaving her older sister 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 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 MHS acquisition file on Caroline's diary, I learned that the MHS had accepted the diary for its archives back in the early 1950s because the diary 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 an archivist at the MHS 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.  Fortunately, the publisher agreed, and The Diary of Caroline Seabury, 1854-1863 was published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

            As I transcribed the handwritten diary into double-spaced, typed format, I also 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.  The only thing Edyth knew was that a large trunk had been stored in the attic of the family’s St. Paul, 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 realized that I would need to explain the principles according to which I had edited the diary for publication.  In addition to explaining that I had included every word the diarist had written, I needed to provide answers to other potential questions that readers might raise.  There are two key questions to answer for readers when one is doing editorial intervention: 1) when should the editor retain the spelling (or the misspelling) of the diarist, and 2) when should the editor correct it?  As I explained in my introduction, I favored the retention of the diarist’s spellings, even when/if they are misspellings, rather than the insertion of bracketed versions of corrected spellings.  Why?  Because these interventions intrude upon the diarist’s text and run counter to the editor’s desire to be as unobtrusive as possible. 

            Other key editorial principles which I addressed in my introduction to Caroline Seabury’s diary included such matters as 1) the principle governing the use of original punctuation and capitalization used by the diarist, including the use of dashes in lieu of commas or periods and the use of lowercase letters at the beginning of sentences; 2) the principle governing the use of ellipses at the end of an entry to denote the deletion of one or more entire entries, and the use of ellipses within an entry to denote the deletion of a portion of a specific diary entry.  (If no ellipses are used in this edition of the diary, the reader will assume that every word written by the diarist is included.  If this is the case, it’s worth noting.); 3) the principle governing consistent dating of each entry by month, day, and year, placing this information directly before each diary entry; 4) the principle governing the uses of brackets within diary entries to clarify dates and to note illegible words as well as the uses of bracketed information to offer definitions.  I realized that such editorial matters might not interest most readers; at the same time, however, I knew that readers who had edited diaries themselves would expect to have such information provided by the editor of Caroline’s diary.

            In addition to learning a great deal about the lives of diarists who lived long before I was born, I’ve also learned some things about diaries being kept by Midwestern girls and women right now–at the very end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century.   A substantial portion of this interest is linked to the recent explosion of communication via electronic media.  Paradoxically, although I have continued to keep a diary without interruption for more than thirty-five years, it did not occur to me to ask other contemporary diarists whether I might look into their diaries until a few years ago, when an undergraduate student at Minnesota State University undertook an independent study project with me.  Carol Johnson told me that she had been keeping a diary for many years, and together we worked out a project during which she would reread a number of her old diaries, select excerpts from them, word-process those excerpts, and write an analysis of patterns in them, viewed from the perspective of some distance and time.  As Carol and I discussed patterns she had noticed in her diaries, I began rereading my old diaries in a more systematic and thorough way than I had done before, and my interest in what other girls and women might be doing in their diaries right now came into focus.

            My diaries project soon became a family project as well as a professional project.  I talked with my daughter, Rachel, and several of her friends, all thirteen-year-old girls who were interested in my research and who offered to share selections from their diaries with me.   Two of the girls, Megan and Alena, were keeping diaries at home, while the other two, Mary and Rachel, were keeping “response journals” as part of their work in their seventh-grade English class.   All four girls lent me their diaries so that I could read their entries; then each girl and I selected the diary entries to contribute to the book.

            About the same time, I began regular e-mail correspondence with family members.   In one e-mail, I talked about my plans for Diaries of Girls and Women.  Soon my sister Linda Kennedy replied to my e-mail, offering to send me her old one-year diary, the one she had begun keeping just when I began keeping my first diary.  Linda also mentioned that her thirteen-year-old daughter Megan had been keeping diaries for several years and would like to e-mail me some excerpts for this book.  Next my sister-in-law Barbara Ahrens Bunkers e-mailed me that her two daughters, fifteen-year-old Kim and twelve-year-old Kelly, had also been keeping diaries and that they were interested in e-mailing me selections from their diaries to include in my book.   Barb added that her mother, Juanita Ahrens, had kept a diary for many years and that Juanita also still had the diaries written by her mother-in-law, Ruby Ahrens, dating back to the 1940s.   Soon Juanita Ahrens and I were in touch, and within a week Juanita had e-mailed me selections not only from her own diary but also from her mother-in-law, Ruby Ahrens’, diary, kept during World War II while she and her husband were young Iowa farmers.

            Soon I recognized that, as the editor of Diaries of Girls and Women, 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. Four 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. 

            That is why I concluded 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).  I explained that “each chapter of this anthology presents selections from, or moments in, a wide range of diaries”; and I noted that I had “tried to select examples that would demonstrate the range of each diarist’s interests and feelings and that would give readers a good feel for the overall nature of the entire diary” (32).  Finally, I asked readers of the anthology to remember that “what is included here is not intended to represent either an entire diary or an entire life” (32).  It seems to me that this admonition also serves as an appropriate way for me to conclude this essay.