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- Hello, my name is Polly North, and I'm director of The Great Diary Project. I set up the project in 2007 with Irving Finkel from the British Museum, and we're now

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established at the Bishopsgates Institute in London. We collect the diaries of ordinary people, in as much as anyone is ordinary, and we preserve the diaries that we have,

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and we make those that are open to the public publicly available. Some diaries will remain closed for anything between 10 and 100 years because diarists

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don't want them to be read. We have diaries dating from 1700 to 2023. One of the earliest diaries we have is the account of a Cornish tin miner sailing across to Bolivia

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to mine tin in Bolivia in the 1700s, and he records eating dolphin on his journey. It's an incredible text to have. So there are thousands of diaries collected

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throughout the world, whether they've been discovered or not is another question, and the ones that haven't survived, we have no idea how many haven't survived. A large proportion of them have been written by women,

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and so for at least two millennia, it's possible to tell that women have been keeping a detailed account of not only their introspective lives but their daily life.

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So very early examples of pretty sophisticated female diary writing can be found in Phoebe Perpetua's diary from the first century. She was a Tunisian woman who was imprisoned

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for her Christian faith. And we were not sure entirely whether it's a fake or not, but it's a good example of there being that kind of impulse around quite early on, two millennia ago.

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Then we have the diary of-- well, the Japanese have a wonderful, very rich, diary writing tradition, and much of that is geared by women. So women in the eighth century were at that point

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the crystallisation of a long-running and highly literary, highly poetic diary writing tradition. So you've got Lady Nijo's diary from the eighth century, which is an example of Nikki.

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And so these female diarists, in Britain, the female diarists, and in America, female diary writing conventions, there's two key principles to them. So you have the time convention.

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So women writing in a chronological format about their personal reflections, and this sort of calendrical format can be seen-- can be traced amongst a variety of professional documents.

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So as early as 4,500 years ago, you have [? Mira ?] who is a tax inspector making personal notes in the margins of his tax logbook, and we know this from a fragment that was discovered in 2013.

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So the sort of wanting to make a note on a regular basis about one's lived experience has been around for millennia, and it keeps recurring in these professional documents. So accounting documents quite often have personal notes.

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Early archival documents, so hypomnemata, ephemerides, they all have quite often very personal notes in them as well. And then you have the almanack, which dates back

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to Babylonian star charts. By the 1550s in Britain and in wider Europe, the almanack had become kind of like a one-stop information shop, and quite often, a highly personalised

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one-stop information shop. And it would have been in households that could at that time afford paper books and had the leisure to keep these articles,

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which not many families would have been able to. But for those that did, the almanack would have stood next to the Bible, and it became such an accepted norm

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that people would be personalising these texts that many were published with a blank page opposite the information page for the personalization. So you have these texts being produced

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you have famous almanack keepers such as Lady Twysden and Francis Wolferstan, all writing in the 1570s. It's a female convention that we can see also in the fact that almanacks were being published specifically

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for women, and there's still much research to be done into these almanacks, especially the ones by women. The dated convention is also shared amongst networks and communities.

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So the diary writing conventions grow up and through a variety of reasons and contexts. So you have texts influencing diary writing conventions, you have cultural norms influencing.

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So religion and politics. You also have communities, so women would have shared their life writing practises amongst families but also

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amongst religious communities. And this dated convention hardens in the 1500s-- well, well into the 1500s. At the beginning of the 1500s you have the first pocket

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watch being developed. so the idea that your life could be measured is hardening at this time, but also I think the idea in the 1500s moving into the 1600s that your life is worth making a note of at all, it's worth.

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So the idea that you have an inner self that's worth reflecting on, keeping an account of in a sort of professional cum personal document is really firming up, and I think

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you can trace this impulse back to cavemen painting on walls, wanting to make a note of the lived experience of the hunt. And you see it in Marcus Aurelius, and Augustine, all these people are

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feeding into the life writing practises that we see in the 1500s and the 1600s, and these life writing practises, the impulse to make a record of your life, becomes ever more sophisticated

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as time goes on. But the fact is that there will not be that many documents surviving, early documents from the 1500s and 1600s,

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because in the Middle Ages scholars have ascertained that it's possible only 20% of the population could write. By 1538, you're getting say 38% of women are able to write,

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and of that 38% the majority of them are nuns or are in religious orders. So you have some wonderful, mystical, self-reflection going on in a dated format so influencing

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early diary writing. A lovely example is Mechthild who writes in Germany, sorry, and her reflections are called "The Flowing Light," and you have quite a number of Mystics female Mystics writing

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about their personal experiences in a calendrical form. So this is just hardening up throughout as people are acquiring the materials to write with and the literacy to write with, and they're also acquiring

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through the rise of life writing materials such as hagiographies, which are Saints lives, biographies, autobiographies. So in the 1500s and 1600s, this isn't just in Europe,

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this is globally, you see an interest in someone's life as an issue hardening up. So there's obvious reasons that diaries are useful. They're good as a counter narrative to the received

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narrative. So you get the history books and then you get feeling history, how history felt, but I think there's two other reasons that are not quite so

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obvious but as important. And the first one is that diaries are a kind of ground zero for authenticity. So women throughout the ages have found in their diary, not

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an entirely private space, but at least a space that was less inhibited than the spaces that their menfolk were living in. And I think in this way diaries can be non-performative. You can reference your inner life

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without worrying about what someone else is going to say about it. So I think this is quite an unusual area, it's an unusual forum for authenticity.

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You can explore what really matters to you rather than what you think should matter to you. Having said that, we have many documents testifying to the fact that women were also fashioning

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themselves in diaries. So you have to be careful how much privacy you think someone's actually writing in their private diary because say there was religious fashioning, so women were trying to develop

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their moral fibre, their religious fibre, and they were instructed to by their ministers in diary writing. You also have women shaming themselves

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for not acting in ways that would have fitted in with the cultural norms at the time, so that they're using their diaries as a place of fashioning as well as freedom.

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I think another reason that diaries are incredibly useful to us as readers, whether you're a historian, a sociologist, a neuroscientist, whatever your field, there will be something

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of interest in the diary. But I think part of the reason that underlying their usefulness across disciplines is the fact they're so messy.

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Like you cannot standardise the form. Every diarist brings to the form their own set of idiosyncrasies, and I think that produces a very interesting, flexible, malleable form.

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So it changes with time. It was in the almanack, and then it was on paper, and now it's on an iPad, it's on Twitter, it's on-- the impulse to record and account

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for our lived experience flows through all these different formats. But I think that messiness also brings a great comfort to the diary writer, because we have a sense that we're

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sort of living in chaos and we can kind of formulate that chatter, if you like, or meet that chatter, witness that chatter within our inner lives, but also we can create separation between it.

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So we can create separation between our outer lives and our inner lives, but also we can step back from our inner lives and take account of it in a diary.

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And I think this messiness means that many women have found it possible in their diary writing to reveal themselves and to help us understand the norms within which we live and within which historically women have lived.

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Because they have a freedom, they can weave together their inner and their outer life in quite novel ways that other documents just don't show you historically or socially.

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And I think for those two reasons, diary writing is especially important to historians. So a diary may be read as sociological or historic evidence.

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Historically diaries have been used by readers and academics in various ways. So we can see as early as BC, Epictetus was advising his stoic disciples to write self reflectively

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in order to know thyself. So that he's using the diary as an instructional device, and this I think continues. Now you see in cognitive behavioural therapy

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people using the diary as a device in knowing thyself. In Japan you have the diary-- also in China, you see the diary being used as a way of honing one's literary skill, one's

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poetic skill, and not just those skills, but one's sense of one's self is important in these Nietzsche diaries. And you also see in Europe and in Britain, especially,

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in the 1600s and 1700s diaries as an instructional device. So you have John Beadle who's an Essex minister, he wrote a diary writing manual which he encouraged his congregation to use.

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And so women would have known this from two millennia ago at least there was this sense that women could use the diary to fashion their inner lives in quite prominent ways.

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And then I think around the sort of 1800s, diaries become-- as diary writing hardens up, as more people have access to the resources they need to write, and there's an increasing sense of the modern self.

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So there's more psychology, if you like, around, so there's more people thinking about their inner lives and writing about them. You have diarists such as Evelyn and Peeps

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who are writing in the 1700s, 1600s, being published in the 1850s, and that's when diaries become a kind of entertainment resource, and you see also at this time a scholarly interest in diaries.

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So many diaries by the every man or the every woman are being published in The Gentleman's Magazine or the Sussex archaeological survey. In here you have the diaries of maids and vicars

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all being written about and referenced as sociological interest. In the 1900s, you get George Mische producing a huge compendium of life writing,

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and he uses it to chart the development of the civilised mind and the male, white, civilised mind. So female diary writing doesn't get much of a look-in the book, but it certainly works towards shaping

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what scholarly interest in diary writing starts to look like. Around the 1930s you have the Mass Observation social research organisation being established, and this is a way of where diary writing is commissioned,

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so it's not entirely private, it's formed, and it is used as a way of understanding how a historical event felt as opposed to who dropped what bomb on who. And this was informed by an interest

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in bottom up history, and popular history, popular representation, understanding not just what Churchill, said but what the carpenter said and how that-- it was used as a way

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to enrich our understanding of history but also our social structures. So it was informed by historical materialist approaches which later went on to inform structuralism,

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and I think this is why in the 1960s you get an explosion of academic interest in diaries. Not an explosion, that's a big word, but you get the beginnings of the explosion, sorry,

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of academia, having an interest in diary writing. And I think this is because structuralism is concerned with how structures influence people and diary writing is non-elitist, democratic.

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If you can write, you can write a diary. So it kind of sticks a finger up, if you like, at all the structures that structuralism is paranoid about,

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and so it becomes of use to a structuralist. A structuralist would be interested in diary writing for that reason, and a postmodernist is interested in diary writing because it defies convention.

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It's not standardised, it's a free-form, if you like, and so that would appeal to the postmodern ethos. And I think now in the 21st century, you see diary writing still taking off, still important,

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because in the humanities you have the personal turn, the effective turn, and the manuscript turn, and these are all boxes diary writing ticks. And throughout that, female voices

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are incredibly important because they are generally speaking in diary writing able to write without norms sitting over them and judging them, or the patriarchy sitting over them and judging them.

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People can speak more freely, and so I think beyond the importance the diary has historically or socially, I think it has a vital importance in helping us understand our own agency, and our own freedoms,

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and we see that particularly with female diary writing. There's two ways of playing with diaries, if you like, as a researcher to get a sense of how feeling history can be as important as knowing what happened, on what day,

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and who did what, and I think diaries have a lovely way of showing us how reflecting on not only our inner lives but the way we interact with the world around us, our participatory lives

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if you like, they help us reflect on what we bring to our lives and to the people in them. So I think a good way of playing a game is-- with your diary writing research-- is to think,

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who am I? And what is important to me-- and explore it on a daily basis, just a few minutes at a time. And through that, practise.

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You get a sense of why a diary matters at all. And then you can start thinking about these incredible women throughout history who we have the lives of. So Vibia Perpetua living in 1st century AD,

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there's very little information on what it was like to be a woman, living at that time. And then you have this wonderful diary that tells you what it's like not only

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to be a woman but a woman, and nursing your baby son in prison at that time. Then you get Lady Nijo who is a Japanese, Nikki diary writer, who was a concubine and then a nun.

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In the 8th century, Japan, there's not many documents that can give you that kind of information. And you get all the many religious, non-- and religious writings of the 1600s and 1700s,

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which are full of like mystical dreams woven into the poetics of one's inner life in a nunnery. And you get in these documents, I think, the poetry of diary writing.

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So diary writing is often cast aside not very literary. It doesn't have-- it's not very beautifully-- it's not honed craft. But it does have a poetry.

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And part of that poetry is this weaving together of the inner and the outer life, which can be revealing to the historian and the sociologist when you open it up.

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But also there's a polychronic influences through it. So you weave together the past, the present, and the future in one entry in a way that you just wouldn't do in another more formal document.

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So I think you can play-- you can open up your research by going at it as though you were thinking in a diary way. So the diary is not just a way to examine history.

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It's a way to examine how you examine history. [How have life writing studies and feminist theories] [celebrated and helped preserve diary writing by women?] Say, diary writing by women, when

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it's used as a heuristic device for a critical historical approach can help us understand changing attitudes to women's health care, women's bodies, women's fertility, women's roles as mothers, daughters, wives.

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Throughout history, we can chart using diary writing. We can chart what was actually happening as women were experiencing the changes in cultural norms and the degree to which these cultural norms actually

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affected women if they did at all. So what we can do is using a diachronic method. We can look at the language that women use in their diaries, and how they reference the norms that they're living through,

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and get an understanding of how those norms affected them. Because always in the diary, there's a weaving together of the inner and the outer. And feminist theorists in the 1980s

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did a fantastic job of compiling these amazing bibliographies of female diarists. So you have a big-- you have these 1980s feminist critics

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compiling bibliographies but also commenting on life writing. So you have a crossover between life-writing studies and feminist theory.

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So you have important bibliographers such as Cheryl Cline, Suzanne Bunkers, and Elizabeth, sorry, Margaret Conrad, and Catherine Carter, all producing these very important bibliographies.

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Now, they are joined by academics across the pond such as Hortense Spiller, and Dorothy Sterling, Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Angela Hook, who have rescued and revisited the diaries of Black

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Americans-- living females living through the racism of abolitionist America. So you have women like Alice Dunbar Nelson, Juanita

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Harrison, and Charlotte Forten. And many of these women are not just writing about cultural norms. They're writing about-- as protest, as personal protest.

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And there's a 1970s feminist slogan that goes, the political is personal. And I think the diary illustrates this and in not just the voices of women speaking out

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against the racism of abolitionist America, but women speaking out against the lack of health care, or a lack of understanding in doctors of the menopause, or menstruation, or any

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of the female health care needs. And so I think diaries are very useful in these areas, particularly. [What practical considerations such as the physical condition

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of the diary or the availability of preservation methods,] [decisions about how space and funding was used to impact a diary's survival?] So it's not possible to tell how many diaries have survived

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and how many have not survived because they're often written in private. And at the archive, when we-- I have never received a diary that's so badly damaged,

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I haven't archived it. But that's not to say that-- I know of diaries that have been burnt in house fires, lost in floods, dumped, and then taken to the tip.

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And you can't-- if a diary came to me and it was so charred, it's illegible. I'm afraid, I mean, maybe in 100 years, preservation methods will have improved to the point where

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you can resurrect that. Maybe they're at that point now. But there's no way-- I wouldn't see much in the charred remains of a diary

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if it's illegible. There's not much for me historical or-- I can't really-- there's not much you can do with that diary.

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[Diary writing is as much a cultural practise as a personal practise.] [How have the diaries' socio political context affected its reputation and collection?] So archives have a certain amount of money

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and a certain amount of space. And they have to make a decision about what they take in. And for a long time, diaries were not considered that important.

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At least, they weren't considered as important as other papers. And so they may have been collected as part of a broader collection of private papers kept

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by a judge, or a famous writer, or a famous artist. And so they may well have been kept in that way. But if a normal person, everyday person-- not that anyone's ordinary or normal,

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but you know that it was to take their diary to an archive. I think they'd probably be turned away 200 years ago. Because why would they want a dog-eared diary? But this is certainly changed.

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In the 1960s, this has certainly changed this approach. And so I think the significance of the writer of the diary would have mattered 40, 50 years ago. But now it matters far less because we're

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seeing the value of everybody's voice, not just the famous voice or the professional voice. And I think the prejudices of culture influence the prejudices of our cultural archives.

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So in the 1960s when diaries were beginning to be more recognised as a collectible item, or an item worth preserving for their historical relevance, or their sociological relevance, you would have got--

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I would suspect-- more White male diarists being collected than female working-class Black diarists. And I think that's--

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I'm hoping that's changing now. I mean, it's certainly changing at the archive that I maintain. But I mean, I would never distinguish based on personal-- based on your personal contacts, what diary I was going to take.

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If it's a diary, I'll take it. And so I think it's important to see that is changing. But that will have-- those prejudices will have affected what was collected.

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And I think there's also been a reputation for the diary as a sentimental, narcissistic, conceited text, or occupation, if you like. You can see that starting with Ben Jonson's satirization

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of diary writing in his 1600 play, Volpone. And it carries on and hardens in the Romantic era where it's seen as a the foppish activity of some fireside maiden and when in actual fact,

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half the diaries are written by men. So the bibliographies say that even though the diary had a reputation up until, say, the 1960s as the preserve of women, half of its writers were men.

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And also you get famous diarists such as Evelyn and Pete being published in the 1850s. And these were diarists who were writing in the 1700s, 1600s. So they get published much later when diaries are being

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recognised for their entertainment value and their academic value. But I think that reputation is certainly changing. That is not to say that they're still not

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a difficult text to collect. Because sometimes they're illegible. They're coded. They're damaged.

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And we have diaries that I've taken in. I've locked for 100 years so you can't-- I'm just storing them for 100 years. No one can read them.

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No one can research them. And that's entirely the way it should be because that's the diarist discretion. But there's not-- it's not just that they haven't been written,

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or they haven't been collected. Sometimes they're collected and they're indecipherable. But I still think there's worth in collecting them because you can't tell what a text is

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going to reveal in time. And they also have been dismissed as boring. So appointment diaries have been dismissed as boring. But I would argue that the Aztec codices in the British Museum

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had-- were just the day-to-day jottings of the Aztecs. And what was boring to them was boiling heads next to hanging out the washing.

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And so I would argue that's quite interesting now. So we don't know what's going to be interesting in 100 years. So it's always worth hanging on to diaries, I think, whether they're ticking the boxes now or not.

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So another reason that diaries have not always been the darling of historians is that they are often seen as-- or have been seen as unreliable witness testimony to history.

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Because people forget things. They misremember things. They lie. But I would argue that a single historian's perspective

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of history is not history. So a single historian's history book is written from his subjective perspective as much as a personal diary.

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So I think there's room for both types of history. And I think it's important that the diary gets as much of a voice as the received history because there you're hearing a much more--

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a rich and fertile feeling reaction to what the historian is writing about. So the two can coexist, I think. There's another reason that historians have not always

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seen diaries as any more than an adjunct to their more serious research. And that's because they are seen as unrepresentative of-- so you will have the idea that one person's version of events

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is not the whole version of events, which is perfectly valid reason. But I think there's ways of reading diaries that would make them more relevant.

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And I think there's room for both approaches. [How might the original intention behind diary keeping] [influence the decision to preserve or destroy these personal records?]

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So I have depositors coming to me with their families' private papers, with their diaries, or their own diaries. And they want to lock their diary,

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close their diary because they're worried that third parties might be affected by the information in them. And in that instance, we would lock a diary,

00:31:46.370 - 00:31:57.830

close it, so the researchers can't view what's in the diaries. And some diaries are just destroyed. And so we have diaries coming to us from skips,

00:31:57.830 - 00:32:08.720

reclamation yards, house sales. We had a lovely collection of diaries coming from a skip in Wembley fairly recently. People are just throwing them out

00:32:08.720 - 00:32:17.540

because they don't quite see the importance of these private materials. And also they might be throwing them out because they don't want people to read them.

00:32:17.540 - 00:32:29.520

So discretion will influence whether a diary comes to us or not. Because some people want to write in secrecy and privacy. And that's fair enough.

00:32:29.520 - 00:32:40.500

You can't preserve everything. And I think, people-- we need to respect people's privacy. And I think that respecting a diary

00:32:40.500 - 00:32:54.750

is always important because even if the diarist is happy for people to use it or is long, long dead, they were coming to their diary of an intimacy. So you need to approach it like a friend as well, I think,

00:32:54.750 - 00:33:07.740

because you're sharing someone's life. And particularly, when that life is full of struggle and people trying to work out those struggles, that's kind of a humanity too that, I think, to respect the document.

00:33:07.740 - 00:33:23.040

But that can help preservation because it can mean that you have good, strong, collecting policies. And depositor rights are protected. You have good ethical approaches to your depositors.

00:33:23.040 - 00:33:32.810

But it can also mean that diaries will be destroyed because they don't want to be read. There are diaries that are written with the purpose of publication.

00:33:32.810 - 00:33:42.650

And it's interesting to think about an Ennin's Diary. So she wrote two diaries. One, she locked away in a bank vault that no one was going to ever see.

00:33:42.650 - 00:33:51.950

And one, she showed her husband. And that has been published. And so you quite-- you do see quite often with female writers as well.

00:33:51.950 - 00:34:07.610

And obviously, you have Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Susan Sontag-- all these famous female writers and polymaths. All of them crafted their writing and their ideas

00:34:07.610 - 00:34:16.220

in their diaries. And I think, to an extent, they would have been writing with an eye to their audience. I don't think it's--

00:34:16.220 - 00:34:32.450

I don't-- even with the diarist as writing entirely in private, there's always your audience in the back of your mind. You're always bringing your outside world to your diary. But there are certainly women who made it--

00:34:32.450 - 00:34:43.010

have made a conscious decision to write for an audience, with the conceit of privacy. So they're still writing with the conceit that they're being more candid than they

00:34:43.010 - 00:34:52.640

might be in a more formal document, that they're trying things out. It's like a creative gymnasium. But they're still writing with an eye to an audience.

00:34:52.640 - 00:35:02.990

So they might not be quite as honest as they would be in a more private document. [How does the level of privacy or confidentiality associated with diaries] [effect the decision to preserve or destroy

00:35:02.990 - 00:35:19.640

them?] I think if we have diaries come to us and they are not allowed to be read, then we will obviously honour the rights of the diarist and shut that diary.

00:35:19.640 - 00:35:33.200

And so in terms of The Great Diary Project, even if you want to maintain your privacy and archive your diary, we will respect that. We're not going to turn you away because you

00:35:33.200 - 00:35:49.430

don't want researchers poring over your diary. And most diarists-- the majority of diaries come to us open. I'm always shocked at how open people are with such personal and, often, really personal details.

00:35:49.430 - 00:36:03.580

And even so, every depositor signs a form saying, you can have my diary. And that's an important document, is a signed contract between the archivist and the diarist.

00:36:03.580 - 00:36:10.870

And we'll honour that contract. But even if they say, yeah, I don't care what happens to it. It's fine. Let researchers pore over it.

00:36:10.870 - 00:36:18.020

I'll still go back and check with them, if anyone wants to publish because-- like, you said that we can publish. But are you sure?

00:36:18.020 - 00:36:28.900

Because maybe your cousin now doesn't want everyone to know about their marriage because they're divorced, or life changes. The diary is a living document.

00:36:28.900 - 00:36:42.490

So you have to respect its privacy in the way that you would a living person. [What silences should researches consider] [within the diaries that do survive to be studied?]

00:36:42.490 - 00:36:57.100

I think one of the most interesting gaps in the diary is the fact that it's a witness to the lived experience of being alive. And as we all know, there's very little we

00:36:57.100 - 00:37:06.970

have a firm grip of in life. We're not sure how free we are, how-- well, how consciousness even operates. And so diary writing is always, always

00:37:06.970 - 00:37:21.200

in this liminal space where we're not entirely sure exactly what's going on. But we do have a vital sense that we're living something. And the diary is an account of that, living in that ambiguity.

00:37:21.200 - 00:37:31.090

And so it's a place where you can explore all these grey areas. Because life is really just grey areas. And in the diary, you have a freedom to explore it.

00:37:31.090 - 00:37:43.810

And I think that's why it's lasted so many millennia because it's built on that impulse to explore our lived consciousness, which is full of gaps, and ambiguities, and mysteries,

00:37:43.810 - 00:37:54.610

and wonderful for it. And I think also on a more prosaic level, you will have gaps in the diaries that come into archives because diarists

00:37:54.610 - 00:38:04.720

are writing for themselves. So they don't give you a full explanation of events. They'll give you a fragment of an event. They might even leave out events because they

00:38:04.720 - 00:38:11.810

don't think they're important, or because they're burnt onto their memory. They don't need to record them because they know they're going to recall them.

00:38:11.810 - 00:38:19.430

So I remember a diarist's daughter coming up to me after a talk once saying, why didn't he write about my birth? Did it not matter to him?

00:38:19.430 - 00:38:26.360

And I was like, well, it's probably because it was just so important to him. He didn't have to make a note of it. He knew it would happen.

00:38:26.360 - 00:38:40.780

He carried it around in his, kind of, internal diary. He didn't need to write it down on paper to make a note of it. So there's fragments. There's also forgetting people just cannot notate all of life.

00:38:40.780 - 00:38:53.810

It's impossible even one second to write everything that's happened to you in that one second, all the feelings you've had. It's just, life outpaces notation.

00:38:53.810 - 00:39:00.230

Not only that, diaries are coded. They're illegible. They're damaged. Sometimes they're really messy.

00:39:00.230 - 00:39:12.110

You just can't make out what people are saying. And they are-- sometimes they're locked. I mean, it's always possible to break a lock. But if it's been locked, it's been locked for a reason.

00:39:12.110 - 00:39:21.520

And yeah, so there's still lots of gaps even in the diaries that have survived and that need to be accounted for in archives.