Journal
Lady Mary is mainly known from her own journal, never intended for publication and instead written for self-amusement and for the amusement of her sisters, most especially Anne (1719/20–1785), who had married William Wentworth, 2nd Earl of Strafford, in 1741. Her DNB entry states: "The journal ranges from banal descriptions of card games and weather to perceptive social observation and expressions of sincere affection, often closely and unselfconsciously juxtaposed. The personality which emerges from the whole combines elements of the mundane and the preposterous with the deeply sympathetic."
She began writing it in August 1766 and stopped making regular additions in January 1791, when Anne's husband died, though the printed edition only includes entries up to December 1774. (Her great-great-great-nephew James Archibald Home edited this edition.) After 1791, Lady Mary did still continue to pass on her opinions known to friends and relatives such as her niece Lady Frances Scott (her sister Caroline's daughter by her first marriage to Francis, earl of Dalkeith) and her first cousin once removed Lady Louisa Stuart. Louisa in 1827 wrote an acerbic memoir of Lady Mary which is another major source for her life.
Read more about this topic: Lady Mary Coke
Famous quotes containing the word journal:
“The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he alive and real, and not dying and without truth.”
—Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907)
“The writer in me can look as far as an African-American woman and stop. Often that writer looks through the African-American woman. Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.”
—Thylias Moss, African American poet. As quoted in the Wall Street Journal (May 12, 1994)
“I think this journal will be disadvantageous for me, for I spend my time now like a spider spinning my own entrails.”
—Mary Bokin Chesnut (1823–1886)