Reinventing the self : fictional strategies in diary writing

Although diary writing had a spectacular evolution over the span of about three centuries, critical attention did not always keep up with it. This book attempts to join this necessary critical conversation on the mechanisms and metamorphoses of diary writing by focusing on a particular category of diarists, namely those who write from a position of extreme vulnerability as a result of either psychological or physical conditions. The analysis of the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Alice James, and Katherine Mansfield examines the specific strategies to which these ‘threatened selves’ resort when diarising. These intimate texts become desperate (and doomed) attempts to survive, and reveal the extent to which the writing departs from the assumptions of non-fictionality upheld by traditional readings of autobiographical accounts.

Investigating diary writing is, inevitably, an open-ended process. It is very difficult to call it a finished examination, just as it is difficult to call a diary finished, even when it has reached its natural end through the death of the diarist. In the same way in which diaries put forth images, different versions of their writers at different times, an analysis of these texts will only reveal certain aspects of them. The set of fictional strategies at work in diaries is one such aspect and probing it is crucial, especially now, when notions of self and individuality are being questioned yet again. After all, the core of the individual could be said to lie not in self-scrutiny and self-understanding, but in self-reinvention and the way that is done.