Good morning everyone,

I found this fantastic and actually quite recent article on Virginia Woolf’s convalescence diaries, so this is a Fem Fri about women’s diaries. 

Love the close attention Woolf pays to everything, both in her books and in these diaries:

Having been ill, she is nurturing a convalescent quality of attention, using her diary’s economical form, its domestic subject matter, to tether herself to the world. “Happiness is,” she writes later, in 1925, “to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.” At Asheham, she strings one paragraph after another; a way of watching the days accrue. And as she recovers, things attach themselves: bicycles, rubber boots, dahlias, eggs.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/06/21/virginia-woolfs-forgotten-diary/

I’d heard the name Fanny Burney, and it turns out she was a writer of exceptionally bitchy letters and diaries. Great stuff:

After her first encounter with the famous Dr Johnson, Frances Burney said he was ‘almost bent double’ and ‘shockingly near sighted’, with his mouth ‘almost constantly opening and shutting as if he was chewing’.

https://www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/articles/frances-burneys-account-of-her-terrible-operation

This article on Anne Lister’s diary and its history is fantastic. It’s also about cracking a genuinely secret diary sex code, unlike that of, say, Samuel Pepys, whose solution to write in Romance languages, mostly French, would have been unlikely to hoodwink his French wife. ANNE:

When Helena deciphered the passage of 12th December 1817, describing Anne’s time in York visiting Mariana Lawton, nee Belcombe, for the first time since her honeymoon, Anne’s secret was once more revealed. The passage read “I took off my pelisse and drawers, got into bed and had a very good kiss, she showing all due inclination and in less than seven minutes, the door was unbolted and we were all right again.”

Helena deduced that “kiss” was in fact code for sex and that the phrase “incurred a cross” was a reference to Anne’s orgasms, which were frequently marked in the margins with an ‘X’. The true nature of Anne’s relationship with Mariana had become clear.

https://www.visitcalderdale.com/the-secret-diaries-of-anne-lister-cracking-the-crypthand-code/

I wrote this on my phone and I hope you enjoyed it 💗

Alex.