SOURCE: McCartney, George. Review of A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries, by Thomas Mallon. American Spectator 18, no. 4 (April 1985): 46-7.

In the following review, McCartney praises Mallon for presenting his subject matter in A Book of One's Own without trying to ascribe a grand theory to the overall work.

What's the point of keeping a diary? Oscar Wilde knew. “One should always have something sensational to read in the train,” he had Gwendolyn Fairfax declare in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Gwendolyn makes her brief appearance in Thomas Mallon's A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries for what her remark tells us of the diary's evolution. Mallon elaborates:

Having been brought to life partly by the dour Puritans of the seventeenth century as a place in which the faithful might privately expiate their sins, the diary had become, by the late nineteenth century, more...