Mark Bostridge
Love among the Paperbacks
A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt
By Simon Garfield (ed)
Canongate 712pp £20 order from our bookshop
‘Must we document everything?’ exclaims Greta Gerwig, heroine of Noah Baumbach’s recent film Mistress America, when someone takes a casual snap of her on a mobile phone. Tweets, emails and instant photography allow us to keep constant track of our lives and to bombard the outside world with the details. But one wonders what effect 21st-century social media is having on the production of the conventional diary. Will such records eventually go the way of the handwritten letter?
Only time will tell, though it’s difficult to believe that many diarists of the future will possess the stamina and application of Jean Lucey Pratt. A suburban middle-class woman from Wembley in Middlesex, Pratt began writing a journal as a schoolgirl of fifteen in April 1925. She was still keeping
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis
*Offer ends in TWO days*
Take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'Nourished on a diet of exceptionalism and meritocracy, millennials internalised the harmful falsehood that hard work necessarily yields success. The very least they should settle for is a "cool job", one that ... is the focus of their "passion".'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/workers-twerkers