Secret Voices

A Year of Women's Diaries.

Secret Voices reveals four centuries of women’s lives through the intimate lens of their diaries. This enthralling collection gathers daily entries that illuminate how women have navigated love and marriage, family and desire, work and wilderness—and how much of their experience has shifted over time, and how much has stayed strikingly the same.

Across its pages, seventeenth-century Lady Anne Clifford and twentieth-century Loran Hurscot quietly endure the unreasonable demands of their husbands; Joan Wyndham and Anne Frank, writing in very different worlds, recount their first encounters with sex; and Anne Lister’s candid chronicles of her relationships with women find a resonant companion in Alice Walker’s reflections centuries later.

From Barbara Pym buying daring lingerie and Virginia Woolf celebrating a new haircut to Sylvia Plath charting her emotional peaks and valleys and Amelia Stewart Knight persevering on the pioneer trail, Secret Voices gathers both iconic and little-known diarists. Their words—intimate, vivid, and often startlingly contemporary—create a chorus of women’s experiences that still speaks powerfully today.