The Diary and the Commonplace Book: Self-Inscription in The Note Books of a Woman Alone

Abstract

The Note Books of a Woman Alone (1935), the posthumously published notebooks of an impoverished London clerk, provokes reconsideration of what counts as an individual voice. More than half the text is comprised of quotations and extracts; Evelyn Wilson’s textual collecting, however, was deeply enmeshed with her diary writing. Blurring transcription and expression, her practice of self-inscription lays bare the intersubjective nature of self-definition and the composite nature of any textual voice.

Writing and Reading Diaries in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

“…As Ella Ophir notes, citing Lynn Z. Bloom's formulation, '''public private'' writing' of a 'largely selfexplanatory rather than cryptic' kind, is 'common to many diaries', even those not explicitly written with a view to publication. 7 This, like Sheridan's observation, reminds us that the relationship between the public and private aspects of diary writing constitutes a spectrum rather than a binary divide, and these two aspects will necessarily be closely intertwined, even when the diarist is writing in the knowledge that their observations may be made public (albeit, in the case of M-O, anonymously). Pratt, who had kept a diary since she was a child, became a Mass-Observer in January 1940.…”

Mental distress under Occupation: The journal of Madeleine Blaess

“…Ophir writes very interestingly about how her diarist case-study Evelyn Wilson, living in the mid-1930s, compiles extracts from novels in a throwback to a nineteenth-century style of diary writing known as ‘commonplace’, where writers assembled fragments of their reading interspersed with their own writing. In the case of Evelyn Wilson, the author of The Note Books where over half of the 300 pages comprise texts, transcribed or memorised, Ophir finds a ‘form of diaristic writing that lays bare how individual self-definition is forged through inter-subjective reflection’ (Ophir, 2015: 43). She describes how ‘Wilson’s collecting was bound up with the intimate purposes of her diary writing’ spotting that the texts she (re)usesaddress … the acutely felt experiences and conditions that dominate her own entries: the position of women, systematic poverty and injustice, family power structures, the vulnerability of children, psychological damage, social isolation, the significance of home, and countervailing all this, the satisfactions of independence and the resources of mind and spirit in the face of duress.…”