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Secret Voices
Secret Voices: A Year of Women's Diaries | Sarah Gristwood
6 posts | 5 to read
'United across centuries, these women's voices open doors to lost worlds and make them seem familiar. A modern classic.' Alison Weir, author and historian. A captivating collection of daily extracts from women's diaries, looking back over four centuries to discover how women's experience of men and children, sex and shopping, work and the natural world has changed down the years. And, of course, how it hasn't. Organised around the calendar year, in this engaging anthology you'll find Lady Anne Clifford in the seventeenth century and Loran Hurnscot in the twentieth both stoically recording the demands of an unreasonable husband; Joan Wyndham and Anne Frank, at much the same time, but in wildly different settings, describing their first experiences with sex; and Anne Lister (TV's Gentleman Jack) in eighteenth-century Yorkshire exploring her love affairs with women alongside Alice Walker in twentieth-century California. With several selections for each day, from the 1st January to the 31st December, this book is a fascinating record of how women were thinking, feeling and reacting to historical events. From Virginia Woolf relishing her new haircut and Oprah Winfrey meditating on her career to Emilie Davis chronicling the death of Abraham Lincoln and teenage Ma Yan yearning for education in poverty-stricken China, Secret Voices contains a rich mix of well-known diarists and less familiar ones, and often the voices echoing down the centuries sound eerily familiar today.
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Tamra
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What?! Entry by Anais Nin 1933. The remainder of the entry poetically describes a sexual encounter with her father and her conflicted feelings about it. 😳🥺 This is way outside my comfort zone.

Cathythoughts What !!!! Way too out there for me. No ! 6mo
25 likes1 comment
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Tamra
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I enjoyed this film about Nella Last streaming on Amazon. Her husband on the other hand……🫢.

Nella‘s diary entries appear in the tagged anthology, which is the only reason I recognized her name.

LeahBergen I have a copy of her diaries that I‘ve been meaning to read for ages. 6mo
Tamra @LeahBergen I‘m sure it will be a wonderful read when you get to it. 😁 6mo
43 likes2 comments
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Tamra
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In memory of D-Day. 💔

TheBookHippie I think of this every year. And my grandpa who was over there fighting for his new country. 6mo
41 likes1 comment
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Tamra
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Made me laugh out loud! The “fast ways of young people nowadays.” 🤣 Just imagine her commentary on today‘s shenanigans!

kspenmoll 😂😂😂 7mo
48 likes1 comment
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Tamra
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Example page. Love Pym‘s question! 😆

The subsequent entry is one of Anne Frank‘s in which she contemplates whether they would have been better off not going into hiding and wants the end to come soon, whatever that may be. 😔

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Tamra
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I‘m very excited to read this as a project through the year!I‘m certain some aspects of the diary entries contained in the volume are likely to be familiar, despite spanning centuries.

LeahBergen I‘ve been eyeing this one! 7mo
Tamra @LeahBergen what‘s great is each day only contains 3-4 short entries, so it isn‘t a big time investment. Very doable. (edited) 7mo
Jess_Read_This I bought this one earlier this year. And it‘s been eyeing me disapprovingly from my bookshelf! I need to just dive in. 7mo
Tamra @Jess_Read_This you should! 😁 7mo
54 likes2 stack adds4 comments