ABSTRACT
In 1945, the schoolgirl diarist Sylvia Plath asked her mother not to give her the dated diaries she had been given other Christmases, because "When the big moments come, one page is not enough." Plath would go on to experiment with the formal possibilities for diary writing all her life. The diary tends to be thought of as a genre that is virtually formless. It is this sense of the diary that is represented by Virginia Woolf's often-repeated metaphor for the diary as "some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through.". Interpretations of individual diaries or diary extracts are often used to support a larger project of interpretation of the work or the life of the writer, and these interpretations often similarly fail to account for the ways in which diary writing is shaped by the demands (and possibilities) of the genre.
