In her first Book Corner column for The BV, Victoria Sturgess from Black Pug Books in Wimborne takes us from war to wit in diaries
The New Year often arrives weighed down with resolutions – Dry January, shedding the festive excess, starting a diary… Luckily for us readers, some people really did stick with that last one. And their diaries remain among the most fascinating, upsetting and revealing of books, offering first-hand insights into human history. Samuel Pepys, one of the earliest diarists in modern publishing, gave us a candid, detailed glimpse of 17th century London – from the Great Fire to the plague.
A more modern diary which is known to all is the heart-breaking Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. Less well-known is her English contemporary: a 49-year-old British woman’s account of life in wartime Britain. It is an unrivalled piece of social history – please read Nella Last’s War for a poignant record of an extraordinary ‘ordinary’ woman.
On an entirely different diary note, if you love waspish, name-dropping, witty tales of aristocratic doings, then you can wallow in 12 volumes of such riches. James Lee-Milne was deeply involved with the National Trust, allowing him to indulge in his love of art and architecture – and gossip.
His style was personified in his declining a CBE in 1993: he felt a knighthood was his due.
I think we can all agree to pass over most politicians’ efforts as mainly attempting to blame ‘circumstances‘ for their failures, but a glorious exception is Alan Clark – probably the most gossipy political diaries ever written, with a wickedly sharp account of Margaret Thatcher’s downfall. He liked to style himself a loveable rogue, though I doubt the Iron Lady – once a close personal friend – saw it that way after reading what he’d written about her.
I suspect all political diaries are really written with an eye to notoriety rather than an honest telling of events. Talking of ‘loveable’ rogues, Jeffery Archer’s Prison Diaries are – unexpectedly – an engrossing insight into prison life.
And let’s not forget probably the most read of all diaries: the gloriously hilarious fictional lives of Everyman and Everywoman. Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody – with the bumbling, absurd yet ultimately endearing character of Mr. Pooter – reflected the snobbishness of middle-class suburbia. E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Woman also ridicules the pretensions of an upper middle class woman, this time living in a 1930s Devon village. It’s a comic gem.
It’s also worth noting that, although featuring a now-distant time and society, neither of these last two has ever been out of print. Some human foibles really do never change.
And of course, the only possible way to end is with the GOATS: Adrian Mole and Bridget Jones.
