The Hidden Writer
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- USD 3.99
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- USD 3.99
Descripción editorial
"Whom do I tell when I tell a blank page?" Virginia Woolf's question is one that generations of readers and writers searching to map a creative life have asked of their own diaries. No other document quite compares with the intimacies and yearnings, the confessions and desires, revealed in the pages of a diary. Presenting seven portraits of literary and creative lives, Alexandra Johnson illuminates the secret world of writers and their diaries, and shows how over generations these writers have used the diary to solve a common set of creative and life questions.
In Sonya Tolstoy's diary, we witness the conflict between love and vocation; in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf's friendship, the nettle of rivalry among writing equals is revealed; and in
Alice James's diary, begun at age forty, the feelings of competition within a creative family are explored.
The Hidden Writer shows how the diaries of Marjory Fleming, Sonya Tolstoy, Alice James, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, and May Sarton negotiated the obstacle course of silence, ambition, envy, and fame. Destined to become a classic on writing and the diary as literary form, this is an essential book for anyone interested in the evolution of creative life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is an engaging study of seven female writers whose diaries offer distinct clues to the relationships between life and work, creativity and blockage, ambition and anguish. Johnson's prologue reminds us that contemporary female novelists (Toni Morrison, Alice Munro) have mined the diary's interior life in fiction, but her chapters stand alone as stories of the elusive muse. Edinburgh's Marjory Fleming began her diary at age six in 1810, two years before her death. A half century later, those plucky diaries would surface into great popularity, a forerunner, the author suggests, of Anne Frank's hidden journal. Sonya Tolstoy and husband, Leo, agreed to exchange diaries and read them in a "suicidal intimacy" that diminished Sonya. Among the literary Jameses, Alice was the "hidden writer," her diary a voice that was otherwise silenced. The diaries of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf reflected and refracted their public friendship and rivalry. Other subjects in this intriguing study are Anais Nin, inscribing lovers, and May Sarton, chronicling solitude and aging. Johnson, who teaches creative and nonfiction writing at Harvard University and Wellesley College, concludes with a diaristic meditation on the value and pedagogy of diaries. Photos.
