ABSTRACT
Diaries and letters as personal records share characteristics which have been exploited within the emerging diary novel genre. Lorna Martens describes the diary novel as ‘a form that the system of fiction has borrowed from the system of letters in general’. She likens diary to epistolary narrative within ‘the fiction of periodic writing.’1 There is a suggestion of the shared origins of the two forms in the word ‘journalizing’, the daily record which becomes a conversation with the self in a diary or with a named recipient in a letter. Both forms might ultimately be adapted as life writing in a memoir built retrospectively out of dailiness. This chapter revisits the model of the non-fictional diary, its traditions and practice by female writers, in order to establish the diary/letter linkages, and posits an evolutionary process which brought the personal diary into a narrative role within the nineteenth-century novel. That evolution can be identified in two of the core texts, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and A Life for a Life.
