A Bibliography of Diary Literature and Criticism

Blodgett, Harriet. Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen's Private Diaries. New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers UP, 1988.

Bloom, Lynn Z. ''I Write for Myself and Strangers': Private Diaries as Public Documents.” In Bunkers

& Huff.

Bloom argues that awareness of an audience makes many diaries, previously considered as private,

public documents. She also asserts that there are no private writings for professional writers. Lists a

number of criteria for distinguishing between private and public diaries.

Bunkers, Suzanne and Cynthia Huff. Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries.

Amherst, U Mass Press, 1996.

Dillard, Annie. “To Fashion a Text.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Ed. William

Zinsser. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 55-76.

Gass, William H. “The Art of Self: Autobiography in an Age of Narcissism.” Harper's (May 1994):

43-52.

Kagle, Steven E. American Diary Literature, 1620-1799. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

− and Lorenza Gramegna. “Rewriting Her life: Fictionalization and the Use of Fictional Models

in Early American Women's Diaries.”

Kagle and Gramegna take a classist look at middle to upper class early American Women's diaries. The

diarists they examined had uncommonly advanced educations for women. They show how diarists

drew inspiration from fiction in order to gain a sense of control or cope with difficulty.

Moffat, Mary Jane, and Charlotte Painter. Revelations: Diaries of Woman. 1974. New York: Vintage,

1975.

Simons, Judy. Diaries and Journals of Literary Women from Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf. Iowa

City: U of Iowa P, 1990.

Spengemann, William C. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre.
 New Haven: Yale UP, 1980.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812.

New York: Knopf, 1990.