The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives at the Morgan Library

Today, January 21, the Morgan Library, New York, launches a new exhibition which features manuscripts by Charlotte Brontë:

The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives
January 21 through May 22, 2011

Charlotte Brontë turned to her diary to escape stifling work as a schoolteacher; Tennessee Williams confided his loneliness and self-doubt; John Steinbeck struggled to compose The Grapes of Wrath; Albert Einstein worked out mathematical equations as he traveled the world; Bob Dylan sketched his way through a concert tour. This exhibition, drawn from the Morgan's own extraordinary holdings, presents these personal stories and many more. As today's diarists employ new forms—logging their thoughts outside the traditional notebook—the exhibition explores the enduring human desire to document our lives.
For centuries, people have used the diary as a forum for personal reflection, a record of daily activity, a companion to creative endeavor, or an outlet in times of difficulty. Many of us envision—or invite—an audience beyond the self. The exhibition includes, for example, the intimate diary of Anaïs Nin, which she copied and presented to a friend, the marriage journal of Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the diary that Sir Walter Scott began to preserve his memories for "my family and the public." The centerpiece of the exhibition is the seminal journal of Henry David Thoreau, whose dozens of marbled-paper-covered notebooks record his well-examined life. Like many diarists writing over many centuries in a variety of forms, Thoreau sought "to meet the facts of life—the vital facts—face to face."

Fine Books Magazine gives more details about the Brontë items on display:

Twenty-year-old Charlotte Brontë, working as a school teacher at Roe Head School in 1836, wrote diary entries in a minuscule script on loose sheets of paper, combining autobiographical narrative with flights of fictional fantasy that helped her endure emotional isolation. Some years later, sitting in a classroom in Brussels, she opened a geography textbook and scrawled a diary entry on one of the endpapers, confiding her loneliness and bitterness: "it is a dreary life—especially as there is only one person in this house worthy of being liked—also another who seems a rosy sugarplum but I know her to be coloured chalk.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Brontëana, Charlotte Brontë