What is it about?
The article examines why women from the Polish and Lithuanian aristocracy began writing memoirs and diaries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and what they chose to record in them. It shows that at first these texts were not intimate confessions but rather accounts of family history, travels, and political events. Women often presented themselves primarily as wives and mothers or as representatives of their families, not as independent individuals with their own emotions. Over time, however, under the influence of new intellectual and literary movements - especially Sentimentalism and Romanticism - their writing became more personal. Diaries increasingly included descriptions of feelings, marital problems, romantic disappointments, and difficult life experiences. The diary became a private space where women could express thoughts and emotions that could not be shared publicly. The article is based on four case studies of noblewomen and shows how ideas about privacy, women’s roles, and self-expression changed during a period of major political upheaval, when the Polish-Lithuanian state disappeared from the map of Europe.
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Why is it important?
The study shows how women gradually began to see themselves as individuals with their own inner lives, rather than only as members of a family or social group. Diaries are among the few sources that reveal their personal experiences and emotions. They help us better understand everyday life, family relations, and the changing position of women in the past.
Perspectives
In my view, these diaries should be understood as texts in which individuals consciously construct and record their own lives, identities, and emotional experiences. Studying them from a comparative perspective, alongside male writings and similar sources from other regions of Europe, makes it possible to trace broader patterns in the emergence of self-writing and the notion of privacy. Such an approach can reveal not only what women wrote about themselves, but also how cultural norms shaped what could be expressed, silenced, or transformed in writing. Further research should therefore focus on comparing different forms of egodocuments — diaries, memoirs, and personal correspondence — to better understand the changing practices of writing about the self and the diverse ways individuals negotiated personal identity within specific historical contexts.
Joanna Orzeł
University of Lodz
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Emergence of Privacy: Motivations and Self-Expression in Polish Noblewomen’s Diaries and Memoirs in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, January 2026, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004749849_012.
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