Writing diaries, reading diaries: The mechanics of memory

Abstract

As long as diaries have been written, they have been read, by their own writers and by others, in manuscript and as published texts. The appeal of the diary rests in part on its promised exposure of the private and secret, but also, if not primarily, on the way in which it creates and recreates experience through the melding of the internal and external, the crossing of temporal boundaries, and the evocation of the actual physical person producing a material object as he or she writes. As such, the diary itself, both in nineteenth‐century Britain and in contemporary culture, becomes something of a machine for the production of memory, whether for the writer re‐reading, for a family member or friend reading a manuscript about shared experiences, or for an unknown reader reading a published text. Through it, an individual's memory can be accessed by anyone and the singular can become collective.