In A Writer’s Diary – published in 1953, 12 years after her death – one can attest to how she balances the weakness of the spirit with its vitality. Or the unpublished novel and musings that Irène Némirovski kept in her bag, next to an orange, before perishing in the Holocaust.įrom Mansfield’s short stories and diary, Woolf – who wrote iconic novels such as To the Lighthouse and extended essays including A Room of One’s Own – learned to include everyday life in her writing and to link what one observes with what one feels.

Other famous diaries have been penned by figures such as the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, whose writings show his alienation from the world Franz Kafka, whose disappointing intimate experiences are intertwined with his literary defeats the shocking and delicious 1927 Diary, by Katherine Mansfield, which her husband edited to share with the world. In her own personal papers, the British writer wrote, in November of 1939, “how does one compete with Gide’s concentration & lucidity while writing your diary?” The French writer – who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947 – was greatly admired by Virginia Woolf. One particularly impressive corpus – more than 3,000 pages long – is André Gide’s diary.

For artists, it’s a way of looking at themselves in the mirror. Between fiction and manifesto, a diary isn’t merely a vehicle for introspection and emotional release. It’s hard to imagine that one can fully understand the complex personality of 19th and 20th century artists without them… especially since they used the medium to give birth to their creations. The modern self and its restlessness can find fertile ground in diaries.

Shadow of doubt (1935)