Diary
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| “ | I have read with interest a number of comments on The Story of Opal ... which not merely cry out that this remarkable testament of a child's heart must be tinctured with fraud but which deplore its 'sentimentalism' and even point to it as one more instance of the amazing American appetite for mush ... But that it is a beautiful and touching and piercingly honest revelation of an imaginative child's spirit seems to me evidently beyond cavil. | ” |
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—Christopher Morley, quoted in an 1920 Atlantic Monthly advertisement. |
Whiteley attempted to self-publish a textbook, The Fairyland Around Us, which was developed from her popular talks on the natural world. Unfortunately, she ran out of money for Fairyland and was only able to send a limited number of copies to subscribers. She then went in search of a commercial publisher, without success. However, in a meeting with Ellery Sedgwick, publisher of the Atlantic Monthly, she arranged to publish her childhood diary instead, which, if authentic, would have been written c. 1903-4.
According to Sedgwick in the foreword to the published diary, Whiteley brought in Fairyland, and when asked about her background, her detailed memory led Sedgwick to ask if she had kept a diary. When she replied that she had, but it was torn to pieces, Sedgwick requested that she reassemble it. However, one of Whiteley's biographers uncovered a letter from Whiteley to Sedgwick in which she requests an appointment with him and describes having kept accounts of her observations of the natural world from a very early age. If true, Sedgwick may have partially invented the tale of how Whiteley's diary came to his attention. Sedgwick claimed that Everett Baker, an attorney and head of the Christian Endeavour organization in Oregon, wrote a letter to him that said that on two occasions Whiteley's mother admitted to him and his wife that Whiteley was adopted.
Photos which initially appeared in The Story of Opal showed Whiteley at work on the reconstruction and pictures of two of the diary pages. The diary was apparently block-printed in crayon and phonetically spelled on various types of paper. According to Sedgwick's account of the reconstruction, it was a laborious undertaking, as many of the torn pieces were only large enough to contain a single letter and the pieces had been stored in a hat box for years.
Read more about this topic: Opal Whiteley
Famous quotes containing the word diary:
“The diary is an art form just as much as the novel or the play. The diary simply requires a greater canvas.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it, dull to the contempory who reads it, invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it!”
—Ellen Terry (1848–1928)
“I do not keep a diary. Never have. To write a diary every day is like returning to one’s own vomit.”
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