Abstract
On June 4, 1831, at the age of twenty-five, the unmarried poet Elizabeth Barrett began a diary. In the first entry, she considered the possibility and purpose of her project with an intensity that seemed to escalate as she wrote:
I wonder if I shall burn this sheet of paper like most others I have begun in the same way. To write a diary, I have thought of very often at far & near distances of time: but how could I write a diary without throwing upon paper my thoughts, all my thoughts—the thoughts of my heart as well as of my head?—& then how could I bear to look on them after they were written? Adam made fig leaves necessary for the mind, as well as for the body. And such a mind as I have!—So very exacting & exclusive & eager & head long—&—strong—& so very very often wrong! Well! but I will write: I must write—& the oftener wrong I know myself to be, the less wrong I shall be in one thing—the less vain I shall be!— June 4, 18311
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Notes
Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, ed., Diary by E.B.B.: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1831–1832 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969), 1.
The diary was not published in full until 1969, so important works like Dorothy Hewlett’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1952).
Barbara McCarthy’s introduction to Elizabeth Barrett to Mr. Boyd: Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955).
do not mention it. More recent biographical and critical works heavily rely upon it for insights into Barrett’s life in 1831 and 1832. See, especially, Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Margaret Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Life and Loves of a Poet (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), 56–66.
Barbara Dennis, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Hope End Years (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan: Seren, 1996), 82–85.
In her introduction to the abridged edition of the diary, The Barretts at Hope End: The Early Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New York: John Murray, 1974).
This is Judy Simon’s interpretation in Diaries and Journals of Literary Women from Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), 17, 103–4.
Andrew Hassam looks at the difficulty of a particular subset of nineteenth-century British diaries in Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994).
Felicity Nussbaum’s The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
Stuart Sherman’s Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Quoted in Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (London: Cassell, 1890), 123.
W. E. K. Anderson, ed., The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press-Oxford University Press, 1972), 1.
Horatio Brown, John Addington Symonds (London: Smith Elder, 1903), 82.
Henry Fox, The Holland House Diaries, 1831–1840, ed. Abraham D. Kriegel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 90.
Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds., “Introduction,” in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 1(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970).
Cynthia Huff briefly describes the “the summary and anniversary entry” in British Womens Diaries: A Descriptive Bibliography of Selected Nineteenth-Century Womens Manuscript Diaries (New York: AMS Press, 1985), xvi–xvii.
J. W. and Anne Tibble, eds., The Prose of John Clare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 130, 131, 137, 142. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.
Heather Creaton, ed. Victorian Diaries (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2001), 36, 37.
Mary Brigg, ed., The Journals of a Lancashire Weaver, vol. 112 (The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1982), 30.
Arthur Ponsonby, English Diaries (London: Methuen, 1923), 16.
Dorothy M. Meads, ed., Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby (London: Routledge and Sons, 1930).
Robert Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 14.
Isaac Ambrose, Media: The Middle Things, in reference to the First and Last Things (London, 1650), 70.
John Beadle, The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian (London, 1656).
Thomas Browne, Christian Morals (London, 1716), Part 1, Section 21.
Steven E. Kagle, American Diary Literature: 1620–1799 (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 30.
Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomens Private Diaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 77.
San Marino, CA, v. In Thoughts on Self-Culture Addressed to Women (London, 1850).
Anthony Kenny, ed., The Oxford Diaries of Arthur Hugh Clough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 3.
James Aitken, ed., English Diaries of the XIX Century, 1800–1850 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1944), 68.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Memorandum Book.” Virginia Radley, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New York: Twayne, 1972).
Derek Hudson, Munby: Man of Two Worlds (London: John Murray, 1972), 32.
Mary Jane Moffatt and Charlotte Painter, eds., Revelations: Diaries of Women (New York: Random House-Vintage Books, 1974), 3, 4.
Heather Creaton, ed., Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2001), 8.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1805, Book Eleven, 263–4, 258, 259. I discuss memory and the diary in Chapter 2.
Willard Bissell Pope, ed., The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 405.
Elizabeth Fry, Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry, vol. 1 (London: Charles Gilpin, 1847), 67.
Barbara Timm Gates, ed., Journal of Emily Shore (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 261, 262.
Leslie A. Marchand, ed. Byrons Letters and Journals, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 233, 257.
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© 2011 Rebecca Steinitz
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Steinitz, R. (2011). Elizabeth Barrett, the Abandoned Diary, and the Challenge of Time. In: Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339606_2
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