Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Being Earnest declared that she never travelled without her diary because “one should always have
something sensational to read in the train”; she was not exaggerating. Her counterpart, Cecily, defined a
diary as “simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant
for publication”. Publication — that is to say, the reproduction of a text in order to multiply its readers
through manuscript copies, through reading out loud or through the press — allowed women to find
voices similar to their own, to discover that their plight was not unique, to find in the confirmation of
experience a solid basis upon which to build an authentic image of themselves. This was as true for the
Heian women as it was for George Eliot.
Unlike the stationery shop of my childhood, a bookstore today carries not only the books marketed for
women by outside commercial interests, to determine and limit that which a woman should read, but also
the books created from within the group, in which women write for themselves that which is absent in the
official texts. This sets out the reader’s task, which the Heian writers may have foreseen: to climb over
the walls: to take whatever book seems appealing, strip it of its colour-coded covers and place it among
those volumes which chance and experience have put upon her bedside shelf.
The possessive reader, Count Guglielmo Libri. (photo credit 16.3)

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