Miss Palmer's Diary: The Secret Journals of a Victorian Lady

In 1989, while moving furniture in the billiard room at the family’s old estate in Cefn Park, Dame Gillian Wagner’s relatives discovered, among old game boxes and household ledgers, three locked journals. They were diaries, it turned out, the work of Miss Ellen Palmer, Wagner’s great-grandmother. Though they had lay hidden from family view for nearly 150 years, Wagner began transcribing them, revealing a remarkable record of her ancestor’s life in high society Victorian England, now chronicled in Miss Palmer’s Diary: The Secret Journals of a Victorian Lady.
The entries begin in 1847, when seventeen-year-old Ellen had the world at her feet. A debutante at the start of her first London season, Ellen was beautiful, rich, and accomplished - and about to experience the world of dances, opera visits, and dinner parties, a rite-of-passage for young women of her class. To record the glittering whirl of activity, Ellen started a diary, which she would then write in, daily, for more than 8 years. She must have been known around the house for this effort; included in the book’s section of photos and illustrations is a pencil sketch of the diarist at her table, hunched over, documenting her thoughts.
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