Secret Voices : A Year of Women’s Diaries

Author: Gristwood, Sarah

Diaries, letters & journals

Published on 1 October 2026 by BATSFORD in the United Kingdom.

Paperback / softback | 544 pages
198 x 132 x 41 | 870g

Totally addictive.’ Alice Loxton, The Daily Telegraph ‘An intriguing, highly snackable guide to womens experiences.’ Independent ‘A modern classic.’ Alison Weir, author and historian ‘The sort of book you return to again and again.’ Tracy Borman, author and historianA captivating collection of daily extracts from women’s diaries.

Organised around the calendar year, in this engaging anthology youll 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, describe their first experiences with sex, and Anne Lister (TVs Gentleman Jack) in eighteenth-century Yorkshire and Alice Walker in twentieth-century California both explore their love affairs with women. It looks 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.

With several selections for each day, this book is a fascinating record of how women were thinking, feeling and reacting to historical events: Virginia Woolf relishes her new haircut and Oprah Winfrey meditates on her career, Emilie Davis chronicles the death of Abraham Lincoln and a teenage Ma Yan yearns 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.