Diary of Anne Clifford
Diary of Anne Clifford is in Stewart Books.
1923. The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford with an Introductory Note by V. Sackville-West (age 30). London. William Heinemann. 1923.
Stewart Books, Diary of Anne Clifford Editor's Note
The publication of the Diary was undertaken at the suggestion of the late Maurice Hewlett, who in November 1922 wrote to Messrs. Heinemann as follows:
“What I really want of Miss Sackville West—and what I shall ask you to get out of her—is an edition of Lady Anne Clifford’s Diary. That certainly ought to be published. She doesn’t say how long it is, but the note which would be necessary would make a book of it. I hope you will think of this. We are awfully behind the French in seventeenth-century memoirs. You will be doing a service to your country.”
and to me in the course of a subsequent correspondence he wrote, “ Lady Anne’s journal certainly ought to be published, with good, accurate, and lively notes.”
The idea seemed to be a good one, and the present edition has been prepared. The question of footnotes was difficult to decide, for in common, I hope, with most readers, I dislike their constant small interruption, whether good, accurate, lively, or otherwise ; but at the same time it was necessary to identify the various persons mentioned, and even more necessary to include the numerous notes which are written into the margin of the actual manuscript. They must, therefore, stand, irritating but inevitable.
The notes written into the MS. of the Diary are of two kinds: some are interpolations of Lady Anne’s, and so must be considered as an intrinsic part of the Diary, others (which in the present edition are printed in italics) are additions in a different and to me unknown hand.
I should explain that the manuscript at Knole, which is the one here reproduced, is not the original document, but an eighteenthcentury transcript, written in a clear, sloping, clerkly hand. ‘The original was probably destroyed, for its whereabouts have never been discovered, in spite of all efforts to unearth it. Whether it extended over a greater number of years we are consequently unable to judge. The first part of it, dealing with the year 1603, is written in the form of reminiscence, and not as a day-by-day diary; it then jumps without transition or explanation to the year 1616, and continues through 1617 to 1619, the year 1618 being entirely omitted. This omission leads me to presume that the original was longer than the transcript which is now all that remains to us.
The sources of information as to Lady Anne’s life are many. She was an indefatigable recorder, and in her old age caused the lives of her father and mother to be written, together with a history of her ancestors ; this document, together with “a true memorial of the life of me,” carrying us down to 1675, composes the volume which she herself refers to as her Great Books. Since not even a memory so prodigious as hers could have carried unaided the mass of facts and dates, it is probable, and indeed certain, that these Great Books were compiled by various secretaries at her dictation from other diaries or note-books, now no longer in existence. We possess, however, the day-by-day diary of the last few months of her life (January Ist, 1676—March ast, 1676), and in addition to this we have a few odd pages from one of her last account books ; but it is only too certain that many papers of personal and historical interest relating to Lady Anne were destroyed by a careless hand at Appleby as recently as fifty years ago.
Although it is not likely that many readers will wish to go to the original records, those whose interest is sufficiently stimulated by the Diary may be referred to Dr. Williamson’s Lady Anne Clifford, to the same author’s George third Earl of Cumberland, and even to my own volume on Knole and the Sackvilles, which contains a chapter on Lady Anne and her first husband. In conclusion I would wish to thank Dr. Williamson for the extreme courtesy which he has shown me in all matters connected with this my present enquiry.
June 1923.