5 things we've learned from diaries of 18th century Irish women

From rte.ie 

By Amy Prendergast, TCD

Analysis: The diaries tell us much about the women's lives, their creativity and their contributions to culture

Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, 'The Ladies of Llangollen' c.1830–1856. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Diaries written by women in 18th century Ireland are still to be found in libraries and archives throughout Ireland, the UK, and Europe. They were usually deposited as part of a family's papers, and have tended to remain untouched and unloved for decades. Whether motivated by a creative impulse or an important life event, Protestant women of all ages took to keeping a diary in 18th century Ireland, experimenting with writing styles and recording a curated version of the world they found around them. What can we learn from these diaries about women's lives, their creativity, and their contributions to culture?

Diaries weren't always the work of just one person

We can see instances where the handwriting changes in the diaries. For example, the diary of the young Letitia Galloway is continued by her mother when she is away for a few days in Co. Wicklow. Taking up the pen again, she jokingly states, 'I resume my journal which I find my mother has made good use of during my absence’, alerting us to communal writing practises across generations of women.

Women often wanted their diaries to be read

Portrait of the Edgeworth family, 1787 by Adam Buck (1759-1833). Elizabeth is standing between her parents gazing at her sister, Maria. © National Gallery of Ireland.

Many of the diaries that survive were intended for a much wider audience than we might think, and most weren't really private at all. Diary after diary speaks to a current or future audience, addressing unknown potential readers. Elizabeth Edgeworth, the sister of bestselling author Maria, used her diary to contribute to her family legacy and record her view of the 1798 Rebellion. She even provided a glossary of terms for future readers.

Elizabeth Clibborn, a Quaker woman who would go on to have at least 15 children, considered the possibility of her diary being read in future by her own daughters, hoping it might provide them with support and advice if they themselves had children. 'Perhaps my dear girls may in perusing these lines receive some information in rearing their dear offspring if entrusted with any'.

Several of the diarists wrote openly about friendships and grievances, before recalling the likelihood that others could read their words and interpret them in certain ways. Mary Mathew from Co. Tipperary, for instance, wanted to set the record straight about her companion for future readers – 'don't let them imagine from this & some other things I have wrote that we don’t live in the greatest harmony together.’

          Title page for Mary Shackleton Leadbeater 1772 diary. Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland (NLI MS 9295)

Many women used their diaries as a way to manage their mental health

We find multiple instances in the diaries of writers describing themselves as feeling 'pressed down' and suffering from melancholia. Several of the women explicitly used the diaries to try to cope with their emotions and to reduce stress. Anne Jocelyn's diary opens with the explanation that the diary entries were written to 'help to keep off fruitless and unavailing thoughts and give a better employment to my mind'.

Diaries also provided a platform for processing grief. Many were written in response to a diarist’s experience of loss and bereavement, including Jocelyn’s, which began after the death of her husband of over four decades, as well as the short diary of Theodosia Tighe Blachford. The diaries also chart women's experiences of pregnancy, pregnancy loss and infertility, with several also including heartbreaking entries recording the loss of beloved children and babies, such as those written by Melesina Chenevix St George Trench.

Pages from Melesina Trench's diary written during her time in Ireland. Image: Hampshire Record Office 23M93/1/5

Diaries provided testimony when other platforms were unavailable to women

We often encounter the diarists attempting to articulate their experiences of what we'd now describe as harassment and non-consensual touch. We find young women being pulled on to young men’s laps against their will in the diary of Co. Kildare’s Mary Shackleton (later Leadbeater), and others being plied with alcohol, as in the writings of Marianne ffolliott in Co. Sligo.

The diaries gave women a space to set down their own experiences and to give voice to those of others. The diary of Dorothea Herbert records her version of the abuse suffered by her sister Sophia Herbert Mandeville at the hands of Sophia’s husband, drawing on the language of amatory fiction and Gothic novels to convey the horrors of the situation.

Elsewhere, Elinor Goddard's entries employ euphemism in noting William Fownes's pursuit of Sarah Ponsonby (Fownes was her guardian), before Sarah ran away with Eleanor Butler of Co. Kilkenny, the woman who would become her life partner. Butler's own diaries, kept over many years, record the women's lives spent living together in Llangollen in Wales.

Diarists don't always tell the truth

We need to remember that diarists don’t necessarily provide a true reflection of the world around them. The period’s diarists, being largely drawn from women of significant wealth and means, recorded a certain version of the world they lived in. In an Irish context, we can note the absence of references to rural disaffection or unrest, as well as frequent silence on the widespread poverty that existed.

Such descriptions are instead present in the diaries of those women who visited Ireland from abroad, such as Margaret Boyle Harvey and Elizabeth Quincy Guild coming from America, which are filled with reference to poverty and mud cabins. The environments created instead give us an insight into the diarists' vision of their worlds and their perspectives and opinions. They often display great flair in composing their entries, playing with language and frequently emulating the novels they were reading. Rather than considering them exclusively as historical sources, we can approach these diaries as literary works which gave women a space to showcase their own creativity.

Dr Amy Prendergast is the author of Mere Bagatelles: Women's Diaries from Ireland, 1760–1810 (Liverpool University Press)

https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2025/0627/1474665-18th-century-irish-women-diaries-elizabeth-edgeworth-dorothea-herbert-melesina-trench/

Keeping a journal

From economictimes.indiatimes.com

There is a singular, unspoken joy in putting pen to paper and watching the chaos of one's mind take the form of sentences and doodles. Keeping a journal is not merely a habit, it's an act of quiet rebellion against life clockworking by. In a world obsessed with broadcasting, podcasting, forecasting, typecasting,... keeping a journal is an inward act where you double as both creator and consumer.

Bliss lies in the silence that surrounds it. Unlike a conversation, there is no urgency to respond, no performance to maintain. One writes or sketches, and in that act, becomes. A journal doesn't judge, interrupt or scroll away. It holds your thoughts with patience, however wild, petty, brilliant or unformed they might be.

Happiness blooms not just in recording big 'events' but also in the mundane details: the way sunlight fell on the floor at 3 pm, the overheard joke at the chai stall.... More than a record, a journal is a friend - unerringly loyal, never bored by your repetitions, never resistant to your thoughts slipping this way or that. Reading old entries offers a peculiar kind of joy: embarrassment of past melodrama, surprises of forgotten insights... comfort of your continuity.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/bliss-of-everyday-life/keeping-a-journal/articleshow/121959545.cms?from=mdr 

"The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1984-1994," by Thomas Mallon: Book Review

From airmail.news

By Thomas Beller

The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994                                                   by Thomas Mallon

 I read the whole thing, all 567 pages of Thomas Mallon’s The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994, which surprised me, because once I got past the parts that I was in some way witness to, as a student of Mallon’s at Vassar College in the 1980s, I had expected to skim. I tried to skim. But the skimming never lasted long. And so, despite my best efforts at slothful reading, my attention kept getting snagged, on lines like:

“There are no bones in David Leavitt’s hand. It’s like shaking a chicken patty.”

“I saw Imelda Marcos, best foot forward, getting into a limo with Jersey plates.”

“[Gore Vidal] is always, entirely, on. He looks away from you when he delivers most of his lines (which is what his conversation consists of), as if afraid he might establish too much of a human connection and crack his own persona.”

“Joan Rivers has a face that’s been redesigned for television but not life: It is beyond surgery, beyond reconstruction. One can only call it a head transplant.”

Mallon is, among other things, a master of the bitchy aperçu and the briskly summarizing detail. He is a gossip of the highest order.

(Full disclosure: I appear twice, very much in passing. In one instance, I come to his office to complain about an adviser; Mallon notes that “her real trouble is that she refuses to find him adorable.” In another, I come to his Manhattan apartment during summer break: “Tom Beller came by on his bicycle for beer—Ferris Bueller’s day off.... He means well but he is a Vassar Student x 2.... He talks a mile a minute and he’s very smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is.”)

The book begins in the fall of 1983, not a particularly happy time for Mallon. He is a 32-year-old English professor awaiting news of his tenure case, while at the same longing to escape higher education (for October break, “the students go off to California & London; the faculty may get as far as Vermont”) with its narrowing, politically correct worldview.

As a practicing Catholic and anti-Communist, he is averse to the party of Carter and Dukakis and Mondale but not yet able to stomach a vote for Reagan. (“There are limits to what one can do for one’s anti-communism and country.”) He is also recovering from the breakup with a classics post-doc named Tom Curley that has left him both crushed and anxious. The breakup and his longing for Tom, who gets sick with AIDS, is nearly as overwhelming as the sense of mystery and anxiety about this new plague, which kills so many of the author’s friends.

“Keeping a diary is not a practice that universally endears one to one’s friends,” Mallon observes in the introduction to his first non-academic work, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries, published in 1984. I read The Very Heart of It in a state of growing amusement and amazement at Mallon’s acid pen. Not for nothing was he a protégé of Mary McCarthy’s.

Publishing one’s diaries is an act usually reserved for the famous, the dead, or the British. Mallon is none of the above. He grew up in small-town Long Island before going on to Brown, Harvard, Cambridge, and New York publishing. One of the touching details of the book involves a reference to his father “growing old and sick with worry as he shelled out all 84 payments at the Dime Savings Bank” in order to pay for Brown.

                                                                                          Thomas Mallon in 1985

The book consists of brief entries and quickly jotted impressions, and amounts to a kind of sketchbook of the Vassar English Department, literary life in New York City during the AIDS crisis, and Condé Nast in its last golden age. Mallon is a keen observer of not just himself but of his contemporaries, stray encounters on the street or in late-night bars, and the political scene. (“Nov 19: Dallas is 20 years ago Tuesday, and we are going through a national orgy of commemoration.... It’s as if we’ve decided to be governed by an apparition for a month or so.”)

In his hands, keeping a diary isn’t so much an act of introspection or reflection as it is an act of discipline. It’s a kind of apple-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away approach, which is to say one anecdote, one image or snippet of dialogue, one colourful zinger per entry. There is a thrill in getting a contemporaneous account of those years, but what makes the book sing is the voice: smart, attuned to the specific, delightfully and relentlessly snide. That last quality, consumed in such abundance, left this reader feeling slightly queasy, but I was nonetheless ready to accompany Mallon wherever he went.

https://airmail.news/issues/2025-6-14/when-we-were-young

Leo Tolstoy’s failed project

From meer.com/en 

By Elizaveta Burnashova 

Is it possible to capture ‘life as it is’?

When you write an entry in your diary, what do you usually write about? Do you expound on the secret thoughts and feelings that have filled the landscape of your mind during the day? Or do you just note matter-of-factly, “Slept badly. Finished the project at work. Meeting Monica for dinner”? When thinking about the world’s great writers, one would probably expect their diaries to be more of the former—highly poetic, intricate, and deep. However, that is not always the case. One notable example would be Leo Tolstoy, who kept a diary that resembled more a highly detailed logbook of his mundane endeavours than a complex literary product of a genius mind. But why would someone like Tolstoy—a wizard with words, one of the most acclaimed writers of all time—keep such a plain, non-literary diary?

The answer could be quite simple: because Tolstoy, like many writers of his time, was a fervent realist. The Realist movement in the arts, including literature, emerged around the 1850s as a response to (and, for the most part, a negation of) the preceding Romanticism movement. Romantics tended to focus on the individual and his struggles in a society that does not understand him, to use rich symbolism to depict the various states of his inner self and to occasionally tread onto the territory of the supernatural, exotic, and sublime. The realists, on the other hand, attempted to give a truthful, unaltered portrayal of reality, often addressing societal issues as well as personal ones and avoiding, for the most part, artificial, fictitious elements.

Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945), a renowned Russian painter and the father of the famous poet and translator Boris Pasternak, was closely associated with the celebrated author Leo Tolstoy, capturing intimate portraits of the literary giant during his lifetime

For Leo Tolstoy, authentically picturing reality seemed to be a passion he developed at a very young age. The diaries he kept in the days of his early youth were quite peculiar: they consisted of pages divided vertically in half, with one side titled ‘The Past’ and the other ‘The Future.’ In ‘The Future’ column, he listed everything that he intended to do the next day—curiously, not only about the outside world but also about his inner reality: the tasks of paying visits or completing his writing were listed next to such goals as ‘not being lazy’ or ‘not having unholy thoughts.’ Then, in the ‘The Past’ column, which he filled out the next day, he stated whether he succeeded or not. The Present, as we can see, is surprisingly excluded from this format and exists exclusively as a conjuncture between the Past and the Future, a line of ink dividing the page in half.

Such a way of keeping a diary allowed Tolstoy to keep his journal very close to life, stating only events that took place and avoiding any speculative narration or ungrounded dreaming. But over time, Tolstoy grew tired of this approach: he had kept a diary of a similar nature for almost ten years (until 1857), and in his later entries mentioned that although he would now rather write down “what is happening inside of me and how it’s happening; those things I never told anyone, the things no one knows,” he simply cannot help but fall back into the habitual log-keeping manner.

It seems like the same dilemma—explaining fully everything that is hidden inside while also portraying in a truthful and sufficiently detailed manner the events taking place on the outside—was the key problem that Tolstoy faced when working on his most ambitious project: portraying ‘life as it is.’. His most acclaimed novels, such as War and Peace or Anna Karenina, are celebrated not in the least for their immersive realism and psychological believability, for their masterful portrayal of complex characters, detailed social settings, and the nuances of human emotions.

In these works, Tolstoy manages to tell stories that seem utterly real, even though we know that they are fiction; he finds a way to make his readers forget about the conventionalities of a literary text, ignore all the omitted details and generalizations, and feel like they are peeking right into the private lives of real people—or into the internal workings of a whole nation’s history. But the intricate balance that supports the astonishing verisimilitude of Tolstoy’s texts was a lesson learned from failure, namely—from his bold attempt to depict ‘life as it is’ that resulted in an abandoned and unpublished short story and a subsequent change of approach to his writing. The failed story I am referring to is “The Story of Yesterday.”

           In 1910, Leo Tolstoy stood on the stairs leading to the balcony, holding a letter in his left hand, Russia

Tolstoy’s first novel, *Childhood, was published in 1852; while being a piece of highly self-reflective, psychologically accurate, and largely autobiographical writing, the novel was nevertheless quite expressionistic in style, seamlessly blending fact and fiction. This approach was the first step away from the meticulous, true-to-life writing style that we saw in his diaries and in that previous literary experiment that never saw the light of “day—“The Story of Yesterday,” which he worked on a year before Childhood. In this unfinished short story, Tolstoy attempted to recreate one day exactly as it was, with no fiction at all; expectedly, he failed. The problem he encountered was that of narrative time.

Let us look at the first page of this unusual text. The narrator begins the story of his one day by stating the time when he woke up, but as he does that, he feels compelled to explain why he woke up so late—because he went to bed after midnight. That, in turn, prompts him to note that he has a rule to never go to sleep later than midnight and that he breaks this rule around three times a week. Already in this first paragraph, the narrator must leave the present moment in the narrative (waking up), go to a certain point in the past (staying up late last night) that explains why the present moment is the way it is, and then abandon the narrative time altogether (mentioning a rule that exists outside of time).

This pattern of circular, rather than linear, time repeats itself countless times throughout the short story: the narrator begins his description but feels that to perceive ‘life as it is,’ as the subject perceives it within the text, the reader needs to have as much context and background as the subject himself, which makes him constantly step aside from the narrative and add more and more details and explanations to the text. For Tolstoy, the present moment in a text cannot exist without the past—the same as in his diaries—but this seemingly necessary stepping aside from the narrative time to explain some piece of background is what eventually causes the text to crumble: the narrative ends up being buried under layers of details and digressions, and what started as a literary text slowly turns into a rather chaotic historiographical sketch.

As was mentioned before, “The Story of Yesterday” was never finished: after three weeks of writing, Tolstoy was still stuck in the morning of his described day, so he eventually gave up. His next literary endeavor, Childhood, already exhibited significantly less excessive detailing and constant backtracking than his ‘Life as It Is’ short story. As he kept refining his literary style and finding appropriate ways of depicting reality without drowning the text in unnecessary detail, Tolstoy ultimately created several masterpieces that can serve as nearly perfect examples for what a century later would be described by Roland Barthes as the ‘reality effect.’

Barthes explained that the new realism that appeared in the XIXth century was essentially characterized by the fact that a referent and a signifier collided directly, expelling the signified from the sign, and “the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent, standing alone, becomes the true signifier of realism”.

This means that the details that are given in the text for seemingly no reason (as they do not contribute to any structural development of the text) are necessary for the creation of the ‘effect of reality’—an’ implicit verisimilitude, or, as Barthes puts it, "that unavowed ‘vraisemblance". According to Barthes, oversaturation of a text with true-to-life details that are justified solely by the fact that they are true-to-life is only acceptable in historical discourse—which is well illustrated by Tolstoy’s failed attempt—but literary texts instead must employ the ‘effect of reality’ without attempting to convey the entire reality exactly as it is.

Tolstoy, who lived almost a century before Barthes’ publication, instinctively understood this principle. While working on War and Peace, he wrote about “the necessity of lies, which arises from the need to describe actions of thousands of people scattered across thousands of miles.” So, the idea of the ‘reality’ effect’—substituting millions of real details with just a few that would themselves signify the Real—was indeed one that he arrived at in the course of his literary career. Although he did not succeed in his attempt to write down one single day in all its intricacy and complexity, this ambitious project was one of the pivotal moments for his development as a realist writer, which ultimately helped him create his profoundly authentic and strikingly lifelike masterpieces.

References

Bartes, R. “The Reality Effect.” French literary theory today: a reader, 1982, pp. 11–17.
Паперно, И. Если бы можно было рассказать себя...: дневники Л.Н. Толстого». НЛО, no. 61, 2003.

https://www.meer.com/en/88762-leo-tolstoys-failed-project

Velmans' book may be the ticket for summer reading

From pencitycurrent.com

By Curt Swarm

If you liked “A Man Called Ove” by Fredrik Backman, which was made into the movie “A Man Called Otto” starring Tom Hanks, you'll no doubt take a shine to “The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83¼ Years Old” translated by Hester Velmans.  The main differences are the “Ove” book takes place in Sweden and involves an old man living in a type of retirement village, whereas the “Groen” book takes place in the Netherlands and involves an old man in a nursing home.  But if you're the “Accidental Tourist” like me, Sweden-Netherlands, they're all one-and-the-same.  Pompous of me, I know.

Hendrik Groen decides to keep a journal while being a resident (“inmate”) of a nursing home, to keep himself occupied and his mind active.  His wife has dementia, doesn't recognize him, and is in a different mental institution.  He doesn't have any children and has no visitors.  He finds that keeping the journal helps him relax and accept life in the nursing home with a grain of salt.  The journal becomes the family he doesn't have, if you will.  “Once I have committed something to paper, I can distance myself from it a bit, and then I'm less insufferable.  That's a lot nicer for the people around me too.”  (I've noticed the same effect for my writing also.)

“The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen” is full of geriatric humour and wit, laced with end-of-life insight.  “Today is World Alzheimer's Day.  What are you supposed to do with that?  Try to remember it?”  Dementia or Alzheimer's Disease, next to falls, is their biggest fear.  Pointedly, Hendrik Groen's story of surviving in the nursing home revolves around, like the earth revolving around the sun, a close female friend he meets in the nursing home.  His friend progresses through the stages of Alzheimer's Disease, with Hendrik looking after her.  

Like Ove's attachment to Saabs, Hendrik becomes interested in old people's means of transportation, namely a mobility vehicle called a Canta.  He buys one and, not satisfied with its 3 mph, has it souped up.  Of course he gets himself into all kinds of trouble.  Here in the US, we have golf carts and UV's buzzing to the Post Office and grocery store, plugging up parking lots and confusing drivers on the streets.  In the Netherlands it's the Canta.  

I won't say that “The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen” is a must read for all seniors.  Being a senior myself at 76, and having just recovered from cancer, except for the side effects of treatment, the book hits a little too close to home.  I did ask myself a couple of times, “Do I want to be reading this?”  But I'm glad I did.  Ginnie asked me what I was cackling about while I was reading it.  I read her some passages, and now she is reading it, and cackling, and reading me passages.  

“The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen” is the first book of a trilogy.  So, if you're looking for something that will last through the dog days of summer, Hendrik Groen may be your ticket, depending on how fast or serious a reader you are.  I'm going to put off books two and three for a while: “On the Bright Side: The New Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 85 Years Old” and “Two Old Men and a Baby.”  I'll switch writing styles and read some Anne Tyler.  After all, she's written over 20 books, which includes a Pulitzer Prize winner.  That should keep me busy for awhile, not necessarily out of trouble.

Ginnie's father, Paul Harvey (no kidding), is turning 98 on Sunday the 15th this coming June.  He resides in assisted living.  Being an avid reader, I think I'll buy him the hard bound copy of “The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen” for his birthday.  He may enjoy it or he may not.  If we see him driving a Canta to church or the barber shop, we'll know he liked it.  If he disowns me from the family, we'll know he didn't. 

Happy summer reading.

https://www.pencitycurrent.com/stories/velmans-book-may-be-the-ticket-for-summer-reading,119999

Edging Toward Japan: Samuel Pepys and Sei Shonagon - the ultimate love match

From mainichi.jp/english

By Damian Flanagan

A few weeks ago, I attended a rather unusual concert in Cambridge, England. All the pieces of music dated from the time of the famous English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). My knowledge of the pop songs of the 1660s is not what it should be and I didn't have a particular strong conception of what music from this period actually sounds like.

We are talking here about going back to a time before virtually all the famous classical composers -- before Beethoven, before Mozart, even before Bach. As it turns out however, the music of the 17th century gets on perfectly well without all of them and is teeming with beautiful pieces and charming songs played to the accompaniment of the strangest of instruments.

We started off with some songs played on the spinet, a kind of early harpsichord, and then the musicians produced an extraordinary instrument called a "theorbo," which is an extravagantly oversized lute. Pepys himself loved music and probably owned the very spinet on which the songs were performed, and ordered the making of a "theorbo" which he proudly declared in his diary to be as good as any in the country. When not writing his diary or helping to run the British admiralty (his day job), he even composed songs himself. 

Of late, I've found myself getting more and more interested in Pepys and his world. Years ago, I listened to actor and director Kenneth Branagh reading extracts from the voluminous diary (which covers the years 1660-69) and recently I've been reading Claire Tomalin's prize-winning biography of Pepys, "The Unequalled Self".

What is fascinating about Pepys is partly the turbulence of the time he lived -- the nine years of the diary cover the chaos and anxiety in England following the death of Oliver Cromwell, the initially jubilant restoration of Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the war against the Dutch amongst many other happenings. But amidst all these mammoth events, there is the even greater fascination of being immersed in the domestic minutiae of Pepys' daily life, sharing with him his passions and disappointments, his surreptitious affairs and ambitions, his bowel movements and flatulations, his moments of anger, grief and joy.

Tomalin recounts that Pepys was an astoundingly good diarist because for him every day of life was an adventure in human consciousness, filled with the sheer thrill of being alive, of being able to sense and enjoy everything the world had to offer -- its food, its music, its voluptuous women, its poetry, its conversation and company, its seasons and heats and frosts, and, not least, his cherished books. All these things were part of his all-consuming embrace of life that makes him a thrilling literary companion.

Samuel Pepys (Portrait by John Hayls, 1666. Public domain)

These days, if I feel like disappearing for a while into an alternate universe, then I might turn to Pepys and transport myself back into the 1660s. Yet Pepys is not the only explorer of consciousness that I have turned to of late.

On recent trips to Japan I wanted to introduce my two daughters to a writer who might capture their interest and so began listening with them to a reading (in English) of "The Pillow Book" by Sei Shonagon. As we had our breakfasts every morning in Japan, we would be transported to Sei Shonagon's world of the Imperial Court in Kyoto around the year 1,000 where Shonagon was a courtier. We would enjoy her sometimes caustic and always beautiful observations on the men and women around her, the changing colours of the mountains, the preferred etiquette of her lovers, the seasonal colours of the mountains, the sound of the flute in the night air...

I must admit that I am a fairly recent covert to Sei Shonagon. In my younger days, I had a far greater appreciation of Shonagon's contemporary and rival, Murasaki Shikibu, the author of the monumental "The Tale of Genji". Shonagon seemed to me much the inferior of the two. But rediscovering "The Pillow Book" with my daughters, I now see that Shonagon is a much more fascinating, individualistic personality than I first appreciated.

She is never less than her own woman and, like Pepys, is an admirably honest and perceptive contemplator of the sights, sounds and flavours of her own existence. Unlike Pepys, she was not keeping a day-to-day journal, but rather a compendium of observations on diverse subjects that cumulatively add up to an almost cubist portrait of a world now vastly lost in time.

                                                                    Sei Shonagon (Painting by Uemura Shoen, 1917-18. Public domain)

Sitting in an autumnal chapel in Cambridge, England, listening to the music of the 1660s, I found myself strangely thinking about Sei Shonagon and about how fundamentally similar she and Samuel Pepys were. In their professional lives, they were robust and worldly, but in their private lives they were seekers of (sometimes illicit) joy and things of beauty, candid in their assessments of themselves and others.

I was thinking that this strange linkage of Samuel Pepys and Sei Shonagon was a whimsical idea all my own, when my daughter surprised me at breakfast the next morning by suddenly saying, "Last night I dreamt of Sei Shonagon and Samuel Pepys..."

When I responded that I had been thinking about them too and that they would have made a great couple, my 14-year-old daughter recoiled in distaste at the idea. "Ugh!" And yet I'm still thinking it could have been a match made in heaven, or in hell, to put two such quick-witted, intelligent and highly opinionated minds together.

We live in a world in which, to a tiresome degree, people are compartmentalised according to their nation, their race, their gender, their sexuality. Yet sometimes, people from vastly different cultures at completely different historical periods can appear profoundly similar in their thrilling engagement with the sheer mystery of being alive. We make a mistake, I suspect, when we keep Sei Shonagon cloistered in a room called "Heian Court Literature", alongside (to her probably insufferable) companions like Murasaki Shikibu.

Pepys himself, I suspect, would have found boundless joy in the colours and beauty of the Heian court, stealing through the night-time garden of a Heian lady, intent on begging entrance for a moonlit tryst. While Sei Shonagon longs, I think, to burst into a wider world, to explore Pepys' library of Western books, to smoke a pipe and drink some wine, and sing songs of love while Samuel flirtatiously accompanies her on the theorbo.

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20250517/p2a/00m/0op/004000c