Does it matter if a diarist is a fictional character?
In my mind, one of the world’s great bits of literature is about the human need for solitude. The passage is in a notebook, a combination commonplace book and diary.
The Note Books of a Woman Alone appeared in 1935. The editor tells us the notebooks were kept by Eve Wilson, the pseudonym for an Englishwomen who fell into poverty after her parents died.
The book was edited by a real person, Mary Geraldine Ostle. Ostle informs us that Eve is a pseudonym, but the details of Eve’s life are provided by an acquaintance, Geraldine Waife. The name appears to have been another pseudonym for Ostle.
The puzzle interests scholars. If I were among them, I’d at least be entertaining the notion that the whole thing is a work of fiction.
I wish the editor had given a straightforward account, but I’m still interested in the character. Eve had a comfortable childhood but had to make her own way. She found work at 17 as a governess. She had a job but no privacy, no place to think. At 27, she found an office job that that allowed her to rent her own room.
I cannot think any woman is happier than I am tonight. I have at last got work which means making my own home away from the business place. What care I that it only thirty shillings a week, that my room will only be a bed-sitting room, that baths will be a luxury, that my food will be bread, eggs, and cheese? It is all going to be my own. I can change when it is too uncomfortable, and yet not lose my work. And if the work is lost I have, anyway while my savings last, a place in which I have the right to stay, to be able to move about without the criticism of other people.
I wish I knew if other women feel as I do. I don’t think it is entirely the result of ten years earning my bread, sometimes with lots of butter, in other people’s homes. I think I have always wanted alone-ness as a drunkard wants drink. How can I explain to these mothers, these employers of home-workers, that a room alone, a warmed one to which the employee can go, is a necessity?
Through the years, I’ve read and reread that passage. If you’re the kind of person who “wants alone-ness as a drunkard wants drink,” you might like it too.
• Sources: Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries; New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984, p. 273.
Ella Ophir and Jade McDougall prepared a critical edition of text of The Note Books of a Woman Alone, which is available here:
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