ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is Warner’s diaries, and in it I show how after the events of 1949 she used her diary-writing practice as a means of maintaining her life in language and to counter her sense of self-dispersal. I also attend to Warner and Ackland’s practice of frequently reading, and occasionally setting an embargo on, one another’s diaries and review the impact of this proffering and then withdrawal of intimacy. Throughout this chapter I note the tendency of diary-writing to sometimes slip its moorings in the every day, and drift towards autobiography or even fiction. This leads to a discussion of the role diaries can play as a writer’s workshop.
