The Hidden Writer

In October, 1928 Virginia Woolf sat at her trestle writing table, a notebook open before her, and wrote, "Whom do I tell when I tell a blank page?" It's a question that generations of readers and writers searching to map a creative life have also asked of their own diaries. No other document quite compares with the intimacies and yearnings, the confessions and desires as those revealed in the pages of a diary. "The Hidden Writer is the first book to focus on how each generation of writers has used the diary to independently solve a common set of creative and life questions. Organized chronologically, the book traces the creative arc of seven writers from age seven to seventy, showing how the diary, as catalyst, helped shape the work and life.

Presenting seven portraits of literary and creative lives, Alexandra Johnson illuminates the secret world of writers and their diaries. A time-lapse study of confidence, "The Hidden Writer shows how seven very different writers all used the diary to negotiate the obstacle course of silence and ambition, envy, voice and fame. Sofia Tolstoy's diary describes the conflict between love and vocation; in Katherine Mansfield's and Virginia Woolf's friendship and writings, the nettle of rivalry among equals is pursued, and in Alice James' diary, started at age 40, the feelings of competition within a creative family are elaborated.

Winner of the PEN /Jerard Fund Award Special Citation for a non-fiction work in progress, "The Hidden Writer is essential for anyone interested in the connection between diaries and creative life."