The hidden writer

Presenting seven portraits of literary and creative lives, Alexandra Johnson illuminates the secret world of writers and their diaries, and shows how over generations these writers have used the diary to solve a common set of creative and life questions. In the childhood diary of Marjory Fleming we witness a young writer finding her voice, while Sonya Tolstoy's diary describes the conflict between love and vocation; in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf's friendship the nettle of rivalry among writing equals is revealed; and in Alice James's diary, started at age forty, the feelings of…