A Notable Woman: the journals of Jean Lucey Pratt; week in books

The diary of an ordinary woman makes for extraordinary reading

Words of love: Renée Zellwegger in ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ (Universal Pictures)

I remember feeling a peculiar kind of déjà vu which wasn’t exactly déjà vu and must have been at least a decade ago, although what happened remains clear (if anything happened at all).

I was on a journey home from the theatre after having seen something wooden and forgettable in a tight-seated theatre with grating, declamatory voices on stage which didn’t inspire a suspension of disbelief at all. Some people entered the tube carriage, two women sitting down in a row of seats facing each other, the men leaning on metal bars on either side of that row. One man stepped forward and said something that captivated the others, who turned to look at him as he raised his voice an octave or two.

Another man followed and as they talked, aware, it seemed, of my glances but impervious to them too, I really believed they were not ordinary people but actors dressed as ordinary people in rumpled suits and laddered tights and smudged eyeliner, just so. A theatrical troupe who, just before my stop, would produce an upturned hat and ask me for my coins.

But they carried on talking, and I looked at them in ear-pricked wonder. The man, with his mousey, expressive face and his kingly stance, made every move in a way that that seemed both self-conscious, and not. The man next to him looked like a whispering Iago. The women clutching their handbags were a rapt audience and the poles proscenium arches, turning the carriage into the stage.

It was ordinary life as spectacle – the world as Shakespeare’s stage – which in that moment, seemed to make art redundant, and reality much more effortlessly intriguing than the strained simulacrum of life I had just seen on stage. The same feeling occurs on reading a book written in a child’s voice that is not as characterful, as ‘authentic’, as a real child’s.

But the tube ‘troupe’ also reminded me that life has artfulness built into it (the man’s raised voice, his ramped up theatricality). It is there in diaries which document lived experience but are literature in their own right, the most recent of which is A Notable Woman: the romantic journals of Jean Lucey Pratt (Canongate, £20; edited by Simon Garfield). This is the diary of an ‘ordinary woman’, started in April 1925 at the age of 15, and continued in 45 exercise books until her death in 1986. Her lifetime, as anyone’s, turns out to be both ordinary and extraordinary. She was a woman of her time who was filled with romantic longing and took an office job and ran a bookshop, and went through war on the home-front, but was also a woman ahead of it – unmarried and independent and wanting, wishing, to achieve “greatness” ("I want to do everything people think me incapable of").

Her diary carries the literary contradictions of many (every?) brilliant diarists; it is both artless, and artful. It expects never to be read (especially as ‘literature’) and it forms its sentences in hope that they will be published and seen, in posterity if not in a lifetime.

Miss Pratt hoped for an audience, which she will now find, even in the most intimate act of documenting her private life - her mother’s death, losing her virginity, her romantic loneliness. Her entries read novelistically at times. There is beauty and humour and a fantastic, page-turning narrative, even as a teenager, when, Adrian Mole-like, she writes about her girl-crushes and first kiss. Fictional diaries crowd in so that her voice prefigures Bridget Jones (she hopes to find love; tells herself off for weight-gain - “I wish I wasn’t so fat. I’ve gone up 10lbs again...”); some passages are reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s early short stories – fluid, impressionistic stream-of-consciousness ("Retrospect: Tipping up in a perambulator left in the conservatory while the others were having dinner. Green peas. Golden curls and blue ribbons...."; The Diary of a Nobody also comes to mind.

The literary magificience of the ‘real’ is revealed here in the same way as it is in Orlando Figes’ book on letters between real lovers, Just Send Me Word, which makes you wonder if fiction can ever be as truly dramatic as reality. Too often we dismiss the value of ordinary life. Miss Pratt reminds us that it makes for its own kind of literature.

Universally Acknowledged

Are fiction acknowledgements getting longer? A colleague old enough to compare with a bygone age of novelistic (in)gratitude thinks so. In fact, he counted, on random book selection, no less than 42 names listed in David Mitchell’s new novel, Slade House, followed by “sincere apologies to anyone I’ve overlooked”. Taking another new book at random, I see that William Boyd thanks 32 in his latest "(and all the others)" he nervously adds. Considerate or unnecessary?