“Your Journal, My Love”: Constructing Personal and Religious Bonds in Eighteenth-Century Women's Diaries

Abstract

Diaries of religious women are often thought of as solely spiritual accounts of their authors' inner lives, but the diary writings of women sometimes had life far beyond their authors and can convey a great deal about the social worlds of eighteenth-century women. This article draws on the manuscript diaries of several women of different denominational commitment — Methodist, Baptist, and Anglican — to analyse the various ways in which the diary was used to establish bonds of friendship and kinship and to construct communal religious identities across generations and distance. These diaries illuminate a range of both intensive and extensive relationships and, in some instances, literary cultures within which diaries were shared, circulated, and reflected on in others' diaries. Diaries were also sometimes used as a form of religious education, so that women used the diary to instruct younger friends and family members in the religious life. The diary was thus used not only as a medium by which to establish individual self-understandings, but was also used by women to locate themselves communally within particular religious cultures.