Sex is like riding a bike... freewheeling downhill with no hands
Secret Voices: A Year Of Women’s Diaries
For women across the centuries, trapped in loveless marriages and domestic drudgery, diaries have provided sanity-saving outlets for misery and desperation. ‘It is wonderful what a relief it is to write this stuff out,’ wrote Anne Of Green Gables author L. M. Montgomery, and the Edwardian sociologist Beatrice Webb noted: ‘One can talk one’s little things out to a highly appreciative audience’ – the audience being oneself.
In her fabulous collection of women’s diary entries from the 17th century until today, Sarah Gristwood presents a vast array of private feelings. This turns the act of diary-writing on its head: here we all are, reading the private thoughts of 117 women diarists. Did they secretly foresee this? One can only hope so.
From January 1 to December 31 we dart back and forth between the years and centuries. You’ll find Oona King going through a cycle of IVF in 2004 – ‘you know, that run-of-the-mill exquisite torture, wanting-to-kill-yourself-becauseyou-can’t-have-children kind of thing’, jammed up against Lady Anne Clifford in 1617 refusing to surrender ancestral land to her greedy husband. ‘This night my Lord should have lain with me,’ she writes, ‘but we fell out about matters.’
Barbara Pym is in a hospital waiting room on May 26 1977: ‘Why nothing to read in the outpatients? Must we be content with our own thoughts?’ On the same date in 1944, Anne Frank is terrified as the ‘vegetable man’ has been arrested for harbouring Jews.
Next to those is the sex-obsessed actress Joan Wyndham in 1945, describing the bliss of intercourse: ‘As our movements became faster and stronger it was like the long ride down from Flichity Inn, freewheeling all the way – look, no hands! – laughing and shouting with surprise and pleasure as I finally relaxed into joy.’
This calendar method has its pitfalls when it comes to chronology. We meet Pym again a few pages later, on a different day of the year, and we’re back in 1932. Then we’re back with Anne Frank in 1942. It’s difficult to build up storylines when you’re jumping within the diarists’ own lives.
The one storyline we can follow, with a sense of foreboding, is Vera Brittain’s. In 1915, in love with her fiance Roland Leighton, she worries about him when he goes to fight in the First World War, and longs for his leave after Christmas. On December 27 she reads the telegram: ‘Regret to inform you that Lieut. R. A. Leighton died of wounds December 23.’
On December 31 of that year, she writes: ‘And I, who in impatience felt a fortnight ago that I could not wait another minute to see him, must wait till all Eternity. All has been given me, and all taken away – in one year.’
I had a few favourites. Frances Stevenson, mistress and secretary of David Lloyd George, writes beautifully about their love for one another. When they enjoyed a bottle of champagne in 1934, she quotes Lloyd George saying: ‘There is a great advantage in virtue – it enables you to enjoy sin so much more.’
I also grew to love Frances Partridge, blissfully married to Ralph. After he died in 1960, she encapsulated grief in private: ‘I care about nothing. I may be stumbling on, blindly pushed by some extraordinary, incomprehensible instinct, but I don’t care at all. There’s nothing now that matters.’
Veering from ecstasy to total bleakness, these entries make for riveting reading for posterity’s insatiably prying eyes.