Reading List
The Best Diarists and Letter Writers to Read
In September 1666, with London burning, Samuel Pepys dug a pit in his garden and buried his wine and his parmesan cheese, then wrote it all down that night. On 15 April 1802, Dorothy Wordsworth walked along Ullswater and noted that she had never seen daffodils so beautiful; two years later her brother turned the scene into a poem. In 1942, in a hidden annexe on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, a thirteen-year-old girl began writing letters to an imaginary friend called Kitty. These twelve writers never meant most of these pages to be read, which is exactly why they are worth reading: diaries and letters show people thinking before they have decided what they think.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 books · Diaries, journals & letters · Updated October 2026
Quick answer
Start with Anne Frank if you have never read a diary as literature, or Etty Hillesum if you want the inner life of a woman finding meaning in the worst of times. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Susan Sontag show writers at work, Van Gogh and Rilke wrote some of the most loved letters ever sent, and Samuel Pepys is still the best company in the seventeenth century. For each of the twelve there is a short introduction and the book to read first.
The list at a glance
- 01Anne Frank Anne Frank
- 02Etty Hillesum Etty Hillesum
- 03Samuel Pepys Samuel Pepys
- 04Dorothy Wordsworth Dorothy Wordsworth
- 05Vincent van Gogh Vincent van Gogh
- 06Rainer Maria Rilke Rainer Maria Rilke
- 07Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf
- 08Franz Kafka Franz Kafka
- 09Anaïs Nin Anaïs Nin
- 10Frida Kahlo Frida Kahlo
- 11Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath
- 12Susan Sontag Susan Sontag
Twelve diarists and letter writers, and where to start
Anne Frank
Born in Frankfurt, she fled with her family to Amsterdam and kept her diary from June 1942 to August 1944, most of it while hiding in the Secret Annexe. After the family was betrayed and deported, she died in Bergen-Belsen in early 1945. Her father, the only one of the eight in hiding to survive, published the diary in 1947.
Where to startStart with The Diary of a Young Girl, ideally in the Definitive Edition, which restores passages left out of the first version. For anyone who read it at school and wants to meet the funny, sharp and ambitious writer she was becoming.
Etty Hillesum
A young Jewish woman in Amsterdam who began a diary in March 1941 and wrote her way, under the German occupation, towards an extraordinary inner freedom. She went to the Westerbork transit camp, wrote letters from there, and was murdered in Auschwitz in November 1943. Her diaries were not published until 1981.
Where to startStart with An Interrupted Life, the diaries and the letters from Westerbork in one volume. For readers drawn to spiritual writing that is honest about the body, desire and fear.
Samuel Pepys
A naval administrator in London who kept a diary from 1660 to 1669, in shorthand, and recorded the Restoration, the Great Plague, the Great Fire and his own vanity and infidelities with the same frankness. He stopped when he feared he was losing his sight. The diary was first published in 1825.
Where to startStart with a one-volume selection of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, such as the Penguin Classics abridgement. For readers who want history from the inside, told by someone who notices everything, including himself.
Dorothy Wordsworth
The sister of William Wordsworth, with whom she lived in Dove Cottage in the Lake District. Her Grasmere journals of 1800 to 1803 record walks, weather, visitors and the people they met on the road, and her brother drew on them for some of his best-known poems.
Where to startStart with The Grasmere Journals. For readers who love nature writing and close attention to small, ordinary days.
Vincent van Gogh
The painter wrote more than eight hundred surviving letters, most of them to his brother Theo, who supported him for years. They are full of colour, books, money worries and the work itself, and together they read as the autobiography he never wrote.
Where to startStart with Ever Yours: The Essential Letters (2014), the selection made by the Van Gogh Museum. For anyone who knows the paintings and wants to meet the thoughtful, well-read man behind them.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The poet answered a young military cadet, Franz Xaver Kappus, who had sent him his poems in 1903. The ten letters he wrote over the next five years, published in 1929, became one of the most loved books of advice ever written about solitude, love and doing your own work.
Where to startStart with Letters to a Young Poet. Short enough for an afternoon, and for anyone at a crossroads, not only poets.
Virginia Woolf
The novelist kept a diary from 1915 until a few days before her death in 1941, about her books, her friends, her moods, the war and the daily life of writing. After she died, her husband Leonard published a selection of the entries about her work.
Where to startStart with A Writer’s Diary (1953), the selection made by Leonard Woolf. For readers who write themselves, or want to know how a novel actually gets made.
Franz Kafka
The Prague writer kept diaries for years and wrote hundreds of letters, to the women he loved and to his friend Max Brod. In 1919 he wrote a long letter to his father about their relationship that he never delivered; it is still one of the most painful accounts of a child and a domineering parent.
Where to startStart with Letter to His Father. For readers who want to understand where the anxiety in his fiction came from.
Anaïs Nin
Born near Paris, she kept a diary from childhood for the rest of her life and became famous when it began to appear in 1966. The first volumes were heavily edited; the unexpurgated versions published after her death are franker, including about her affair with Henry Miller and her relationship with her own father, and readers should know the diaries are shaped as much as recorded.
Where to startStart with Henry and June (1986), from the unexpurgated diary. For readers interested in female desire, and in how a woman shapes her own story.
Frida Kahlo
The painter kept an illustrated diary for roughly the last ten years of her life, filled with watercolours, sketches, poems and love notes to Diego Rivera, written while she lived with constant pain. It was published as a facsimile in 1995.
Where to startStart with The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait. For visual readers: you look at this book as much as you read it.
Sylvia Plath
The poet kept journals from her student years in America to her life in England with Ted Hughes. They record ambition, depression, marriage and the hard daily work of becoming a writer. The unabridged edition of 2000 restored what earlier editions had left out.
Where to startStart with The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000). For readers who love The Bell Jar and want the voice without the fictional mask.
Susan Sontag
The critic and essayist kept notebooks from the age of fourteen: reading lists, rules for herself, and frank entries about her sexuality and her ambitions. Her son David Rieff edited them for publication after her death.
Where to startStart with Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963 (2008). For readers who want to watch a formidable mind form itself, list by list.
Not sure where to start?
If you have never read a diary as literature
→ Start with Anne Frank, then Etty Hillesum.
If you want to know how writers work
→ Read Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath.
If you want advice in the form of letters
→ Read Rilke, then Van Gogh.
If you want history from someone who was there
→ Read Samuel Pepys.
Some shop links on this page are affiliate links. bol.com links go straight to the shop.
Frequently asked questions about diarists and letter writers
What is the most famous diary ever written?
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, first published in Dutch in 1947 as Het Achterhuis and since translated into dozens of languages. In English, the diary of Samuel Pepys is the most famous historical one.
Which diaries are written by women?
On this list: Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum, Dorothy Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, Frida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath and Susan Sontag.
What should I read after Anne Frank?
Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life. She was also a young Jewish woman in occupied Amsterdam, a little older, and her diary is more inward and spiritual.
What are the best collections of letters to read?
Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is the shortest and most loved. Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo, collected in Ever Yours, are the richest.
Are Anaïs Nin’s diaries true?
They are real diaries, but she rewrote and edited them, and the first published volumes left a great deal out. The unexpurgated editions published after her death are franker.
Footnotes
- Anne Frank’s diary was first published in the Netherlands in 1947 as Het Achterhuis.
- Dorothy Wordsworth’s daffodils entry is dated 15 April 1802 in the Grasmere journal (Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Mary Moorman, Oxford University Press, 1971).
- Samuel Pepys’s diary, written in shorthand, was first deciphered and published in 1825.
From the bookshelf
“I never saw daffodils so beautiful”
— Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal, 15 April 1802
More books I keep coming back to are on my personal bookshelf, and every month one of them goes out to the Night Owl Bookclub.
Stay Connected.
I update this list as I read. New picks go to my monthly newsletter first.
