Secret Voices: A Year of Women's Diaries

January

Secret Voices: A Year of Women's Diaries

Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries offers an intimate glimpse into women’s lives across four centuries, told through their own private words. Honest, moving, and often surprising, it reveals how everyday thoughts connect women across time.

Ever wondered what Virginia Woolf was writing on her diaries?

Secret Voices: A Year of Women's Diaries is a captivating collection of daily extracts from artists, writers suffragette and other women's diaries. Look back over four centuries to discover how women's experience has changed down the years. And, of course, how it hasn't.

With several selections for each day, from the 1st January to the 31st December, this book is a fascinating record of how women were thinking, feeling and reacting to historical events. From Virginia Woolf relishing her new haircut and Oprah Winfrey meditating on her career to Emilie Davis chronicling the death of Abraham Lincoln and teenage Ma Yan yearning for education in poverty-stricken China, Secret Voices contains a rich mix of well-known diarists and less familiar ones, and often the voices echoing down the centuries sound eerily familiar today.

Start the year by writing your own notes with our Bloomsbury inspired Cambridge Imprint's stationery. 

Related collection

Browse our curated collection that inspired our choice of this month book of the month.

Book of the month

Each month the Courtauld Shop team brings you delightful books picked for its relationship to our collection or gallery activities.