cover image The Hidden Writer

The Hidden Writer

Alexandra Johnson. Doubleday Books, $22.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-385-47829-8

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. (May)