When is it research and when is it voyeurism?
That’s the question I’ve been asking myself as I’ve read through some of the diaries and letters I obtained during my recent swing through the south.
The heroine‘s sister made me question the decision to read other people’s personal accounts when she scrawled a stern warning on the opening page of her diary, written when she was 18:
“Whoever reads a single line in this book without the writer’s permission will forfeit her love and respect forever . . . strictly private. For me alone.”
Well . . . she’s been dead for 125 years and her grandchildren sold the diary to the University of North Carolina. Who’s the guilty one here if I read what she herself calls “the innocent outpourings of a child’s heart?”
I’m reading it for factual purposes–she provides me with dates and locations of her sister, my true heroine. There’s nothing particularly shocking in this young woman’s diary. I’m safe.
I’m not worried about reading letters written by people long dead who have been the subjects of several books. As I explained earlier, I even got lucky and found a typed transcript of a number of the important letters–thus enabling me not only to understand my hero better, but actually to read his words with ease.
And he was quite a writer, a romantic man, when he wrote his wife.
That’s when I began to feel unease.
Writing from prison to an ailing pregnant wife, he poured out his love across the miles and sitting before my computer screen, I started to squirm. The words are beautiful, my heart pounded. Yours will, too, at thoughts like the following:
In talking about their baby he wrote: “I am so very impatient to see it, will it not be sweet, Love? I shall eat it up.”
“I have so many things to tell you, my Angel, that I cannot write . . . My life shall be devoted to you, and my only pleasure will be in making you happy. Would that you could see some of the many pictures my imagination paints, the would all delight and some astonish you.”
Or,
“How fortunate I have been the last week, it seems as if a hand had opened and thrown, suddenly upon me a hand full of sunbeams. Separated from you nothing affords me half the pleasure as receiving a letter from my Idol.”
And then we have references to trying “to peep at her cluster of grapes,” as she washed up.
I’ll leave that one to your imagination.
Our heroine’s children spoke of her going to the carriage house alone and spending hours rereading the old letters. Their father warned them she needed to spend time with the memories of her first husband. One day they looked out and saw smoke coming up from behind the outbuilding.
She burned her diary. They thought she burned her letters.
I don’t think she could bring herself to burn her first husband’s beautiful letters. They’re hard for me to read in their beauty–of hopes and dreams that would only be realized for a short time amid a dreadful war. But they remind me, too, that the hearts and souls of men and women through the ages follow the same flights of joy and fancy back to the ones who love them best of all.
Just like love and romance, poetic words, do for you and me.
So, am I a voyeur?
Or merely the chronicler of a beautiful love story?
Only history will tell.
I love it — but you’re killing me! Anticipation makes the final product even better, though, right?
I don’t think of reading historical diaries as voyeurism. I can see where an 18 year old would write “Whoever reads a single line in this book without the writer’s permission will forfeit her love and respect forever . . . strictly private. For me alone.” I also see your point of reading other people’s private thoughs but historically there is much to be learned about people’s lives in other eras. And if they have been dead for 125 years doesn’t a copyright run out after so long? I think it is so important to learn about people’s thoughts so we can better understand ourselves. I don’t really care about the dates of battles or how many people were killed (thinking about the Civil War), but I want to know what the Private or the General was was thinking about when he thought he might die or the prisoner writing to his wife and declaring his love or the wife or girl friend who has no idea what is going on when the husband or boy friend is at battle or out hunting for food or traveling to another town and she writes how much she loves him.. What might seem like evasion of privacy eventually become important historical data. And I apologize to any writer who feels that I have read his or her private thoughts without their permission. I hereby ask your permission.
I just read about the novel you are writing about General John Hunt Morgan and his wife Mattie Ready.. I love Civil War novels. I am curious as how you picked General Morgan and his wife to write about. When will the books be published?
Thanks Michelle. I hope I haven’t commented too much.
I agree with you, of course, Gilda or I wouldn’t be reading through all these letters as I work through my research. Some of them, however, became more intimate than I felt comfortable with–and yet, I needed to read them to understand my characters better. For me, they’ll fill a very nice spot in my novel because of their raw power. But this very proper heroine is probably rolling over in her grave . . .
Oops. I forgot to ask you about your geneaology work and your book Pioneer Stock and Travels with Jeanette, I tried to find it at Amazon, etc., but no luck.. Is it a published book. Thanks
Pioneer Stock was self published in 2001 and is available in the Library of Congress and at several genealogical libraries around the country–DAR in DC, Allen County Public Library, LDS library in Waipahu, HI; LDS library in Ukiah, CA and at the big one in Salt Lake City. I have no idea if it’s been microfilmed or not but it is a 900+ end noted family history told in prose but with complete bibliological documentation. My only published work so far is the NY Times best selling, A Log Cabin Christmas in which I wrote The Dogtrot Christmas. A stand-alone novel, Bridging Two Hearts will release this winter and I just got a contract today for a novella, An Inconvenient Gamble, which will be published in another novella series next summer. The Morgan book is being shopped right now–the story is so over-the-top wild, romantic and full of spiritual insight, that I’m pretty optimistic about its chances of selling. Thanks for asking!