The Diaries
There are 71 diaries starting in 1941 when Shirley was 15 years old and ending in 2012, the year she died.
The very first diaries are Lett's 'Schoolgirl Diaries' filled with all sorts of useful information: special dates, historical events, tables of weights and measures, and, as it is the war years, plenty of small pictures of allied planes or ships. As well as recording her daily life, at the back of each diary there is list of all the books she's read, the films she's seen and the concerts she's been to.
The 1941 diary, when she started to go to Pitmans to learn to be a secretary, is full of undecipherable shorthand!
The first 18 diaries are small, pocket-type diaries. Then, in 1960, Shirley started buying the large, page-a-day diaries that she continued filling right up to the day before she went into hospital for the last time in October 2012.
Shirley rarely, if ever, went to bed without writing something - either in the diary itself, or on some notepaper which she'd later copy into the diary. As well as filling many pages she would often insert a letter or postcard or some other information between the pages. So, when opening a diary, one has to be careful to ensure nothing falls out from between the pages.
A lot of the diary entries are a record of and comments upon her daily life. She can be both very funny and very rude about the people she meets and her circle of friends and acquaintances. But occasionally, having read, seen or heard something, she would become much more philosophical, as in this entry from Thursday 18th June 1964.
"I have read and read and read today, and yesterday. Christina Rossetti. And I have just put the book down after reading it this evening. I went right through it, skipping pages, to the end, and found it very moving. The man she had loved and sacrificed loving anyone else proved, after his death, to have not been worth it all. He left a book of autobiographical notes to be published and was very cruel in it to his friends, particularly Gabriel Rosetti. And what he had covered up in life was obviously revealed - his jealousy for the better talents his friends had. No one now has ever heard of William Bell Scott, but everyone knows Rosetti, Swinburn, Holman Hunt et cetera - the Pre-Raphaelites.
And this was the man who had been the cause of her poetry, of her various moods of despondency and uplift, her sense of guilt, everything. And the reason she turned more to religion.
But I thought again - first what a waste of life for her - and then - does it have to be this way for women of artistic talents - the triumph of their art instead of having a full life of love, husband, children etc. Would she have been such a wonderful poet if she had, for instance, married Scott and lived the usual life OR would she still have written in the unhappiness that he would have caused her? But she would not, perhaps, have turned to religion. These religious poems have the thoughts, I suppose that nuns have, or very religious people but they seem so dated and so strange to someone who is not a Christian."
Many of the diaries have got small paper markers inserted at various dates, with a word or two about what they are marking. It's clear that after Alfred died in 2006, Shirley gradually went through all the diaries and marked those 'special' moments, either for herself or in the knowledge that someone might read them.