ABSTRACT
The act of keeping a diary in private was a heavily encoded and loaded activity in the nineteenth century. The publication of a woman's diary required a much more complex negotiation between the self and society. The first female-authored published diary was that of Frances Burney which appeared in seven volumes between 1842 and 1846.1 The Diary and Letters of Madame D 'Arblay used material dating between 1778 and 1840 which Burney herself had reviewed in the last twenty years of her life and which passed into the marketplace as family chronicle, domestic memoir and spiritual autobiography. Burney's diary is both a representative example and a potential catalyst for the diary narratives which occur in nineteenth-century novels. Her diary reached the marketplace through a complex process of preservation and transmission. Its public appearance was only authorized after a renegotiation of public and private character which exposes the very tensions that the private diarist experienced in using her text for self representation.
