Copyright © 2026 OyList. All Rights Reserved.
Share
Items12
1
Martha Ballard
Ballard’s diary often starts with the weather. Read on and the midwife’s visits, births, illnesses, and household work appear in the same daily record. It gives the work of caring for a Maine community a place beside the ordinary jobs that kept a household going.
More about Martha Ballard2
Anne Lister
Born
Lister wrote about running her Yorkshire estate and recorded some private matters in code. Read the diary for the distance between the life a landowner had to lead in public and the relationships she could describe on her own terms.
More about Anne Lister3
Samuel Pepys
Born
Start with the entries on the Great Fire, then read back into the everyday errands and conversations that surround them. Pepys wrote in shorthand, and his account of London changes scale quickly, from where a family could carry its possessions to what the king was doing about the fire.
More about Samuel Pepys4
Anne Frank
Born
Compare the diary entries Anne first wrote in hiding with the version she began revising for readers. The Anne Frank House preserves both versions. Reading them together gives you a view of a young person recording events and making deliberate decisions about how to tell her story.
More about Anne Frank5
Etty Hillesum
Born
Hillesum’s Amsterdam diaries begin with a close look at her relationships and reading. As anti-Jewish restrictions tighten, the war takes up more space on the page. Read the diary beside her letters to see what changes when she writes to somebody else.
More about Etty Hillesum6
Dorothy Wordsworth
Born
In the Grasmere journal, Dorothy records the daffodils she and William saw by a lake. Try reading that entry next to his later poem. It lets you follow a shared walk into two different pieces of writing, and the diary gives Dorothy her own account of what caught her attention.
More about Dorothy Wordsworth7
Mary Boykin Chesnut
Chesnut began keeping a diary as the Civil War approached. Her access to Confederate political and military circles gives the account a particular vantage point. Read it with that position in mind. The people she heard from and the places she could go shape the record as much as the events she describes.
More about Mary Boykin Chesnut8
Hélène Berr
Berr was a student in occupied Paris when she began the diary in 1942. The entry about going out wearing the yellow star shows how a rule imposed on Jewish people changed the experience of walking through familiar streets. Start there if you want to see a public policy through a particular day.
More about Hélène Berr9
Nella Last
Born
Last wrote for Britain’s Mass Observation project from her home in Barrow-in-Furness. The entries were a way to record ordinary life in wartime for readers she did not know. That makes them an interesting companion to a private diary, even when both writers are describing what happened at home.
More about Nella Last10
James Woodforde
The Norfolk clergyman wrote about the business of parish life, including a gift of a leather-bound register. Such details give a reader something to look for beyond the larger events of the period. This is a diary to dip into when you want to see what was worth noting in an ordinary week.
More about James Woodforde11
Takasue's daughter
In the Sarashina Diary, an author known as Sugawara no Takasue’s daughter looks back on a journey to the capital and on reading The Tale of Genji. It gives a view of what a book could mean to a reader in eleventh-century Japan. The adult writer’s hindsight is part of what you are reading.
More about Takasue's daughter12
Sarah Morgan Dawson
Born
Dawson’s Civil War diary follows a young woman from Baton Rouge through the upheaval of war. Its published introduction explains how the diary escaped destruction. Reading her entries alongside that account helps you see why the survival of an ordinary notebook can shape whose point of view reaches later readers.
More about Sarah Morgan Dawson
