Secret Voices

Name: Secret Voices
Price: 27.99 AUD
Availability: PreOrder
ISBN: 9781837330720

A Year of Women's Diaries

Sarah Gristwood

$27.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

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English

Batsford
15 September 2026

Diaries, letters & journals; Memoirs; Literature, Poetry & Criticism; Gender studies: women

'Totally addictive.' - Alice Loxton, The Daily Telegraph

'An intriguing, highly snackable guide to women's experiences.' - Independent

'A modern classic.' - Alison Weir, author and historian

'The sort of book you return to again and again.' - Tracy Borman, author and historian

A captivating collection of daily extracts from women's diaries, looking back over four centuries to discover how women's experience - of men and children, sex and shopping, work and the natural world - has changed down the years. And, of course, how it hasn't.

Organised around the calendar year, in this engaging anthology, now in paperback with a beautifully illustrated new cover, you'll find Lady Anne Clifford in the seventeenth century and Loran Hurnscot in the twentieth both stoically recording the demands of an unreasonable husband; Joan Wyndham and Anne Frank, at much the same time, but in wildly different settings, describing their first experiences with sex; and Anne Lister (TV's Gentleman Jack) in eighteenthcentury Yorkshire exploring her love affairs with women alongside Alice Walker in twentieth-century California.

With several selections for each day, from 1 January to 31 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.

By: Sarah Gristwood
Imprint: Batsford
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm,
ISBN: 9781837330720
ISBN 10: 1837330727
Pages: 544
Publication Date: 15 September 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Sarah Gristwood is a biographer, journalist and commentator on royal affairs. Her previous books include the bestselling Arbella: England's Lost Queen, The Tudors in Love, Secret Voices and biographies of Beatrix Potter, Winston Churchill, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, and HM Queen Elizabeth II. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Honorary Patron of Historic Royal Palaces, and regularly contributes to TV documentary series and coverage of royal events. She lives in Kent.