7.6 /10 1 Votes
Language English Media type Print Originally published 1977 Page count 320 | 3.8/5 Goodreads Publication date 1977 Pages 320 Genre Fiction | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Similar Works by Patricia Highsmith, Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Edith's Diary (1977) is a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith, the seventeenth of her 22 novels. It was first published in the UK by Heinemann. One critic described it as "a relentless dissection of an unexceptional life that burns itself out from a lack of love and happiness".
Contents
Composition
Highsmith replicated the dislocation she used in The Cry of the Owl years earlier, moving her characters from New York City to small town Pennsylvania. She also replicated her own obsessive diary writing in the lead character. She dedicated the novel to "Marion", the way her sometime lover Marion Aboudaram asked to be referenced.
Knopf rejected the manuscript in 1976. It apparently encountered problems because of its failure to fit into a recognizable genre, neither mystery nor suspense nor traditional fiction. It was published the next year first by Heinemann in London and then by Simon & Schuster in New York.
Like most of Highsmith's novels, the novel includes a murder, though its significance for the plot and the characters is negligible.
Synopsis
The novel describes "the externally and internally imposed exile of the discarded middle-aged woman". The background of the novel is that Edith Howland, a housewife with liberal political views, lives in New York City with her husband Brett, a journalist, and their 10-year-old son Cliffie, who, on their last night before moving, tries to kill the family's pet cat. They relocate to small town Pennsylvania, and Cliffie begins to exhibit problematic and anti-social behavior.
The novel presents the increasingly stark contrasts between the life Edith records in her diary and the life she lives. She records in her diary the details of an imaginary, much more successful life where she has friends and grandchildren. In the mid-1950s, her husband abandons her for a younger woman and she is left caring for Cliffie, who has become an alcoholic, and Brett's senile uncle George. Even as she retreats into her diary, she remains always aware of other social injustices, notably maintaining a critique of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. She is perfectly aware of the larger world around her. Only her personal life is recast in the diary.
Her ex-husband eventually forces her to see a psychiatrist. She dies in an accident when rushing to hide her diary from others' inspection.
Reception
The New Yorker called this novel "her strongest, her most imaginative, and by far her most substantial"
In the New York Times, Jane Larkin Crane wrote: "Edith's Diary takes the form of an old-fashioned psychological chiller, but there is also something stronger, the poignancy of her struggle not to go under. She is betrayed by such ordinary dreams."
Edith's Diary has been described as "one of her bleakest" novels, that "presents a narrative of a woman's life that offers no redemptive possibilities and is portrayed instead as a slow but unremitting descent into madness".
Adaptation
Edith's Diary was adapted into the German film Ediths Tagebuch (1983), directed by Hans W. Geißendörfer and starring Angela Winkler as Edith. Highsmith called the film "dreadful" and said: "Making the son in love with the mother is a lot of Oedipal crap."