Not the saint they made of her

Shelved at 940.53, between two books of photographs I never once saw a child take down. This moved constantly. Some years I had six copies and not one of them on the shelf in March.

The trouble is what has been built around it. Every assembly, every well-meant display with a candle on it, has sanded her down into a symbol, and the symbol is dull. The girl in the actual diary is funny, vain, extremely rude about her mother, and interested in her own body in a way that got the book quietly reshelved in a fair number of schools including, for two terms in the nineties, ours. I lost that argument and then I won it.

Read the Definitive Edition. The one your mother had was edited by her father, and he had his reasons, but you are reading half a girl.

Here is what I used to say to a class, when I was allowed to say anything: she wasn't writing a testament. She was revising. She had got hold of the idea that the diary might be published after the war and she was going back through it, cutting and improving, exactly like any other writer. A girl doing her second draft in an attic. No assembly I ever sat through has mentioned that once.

Nine rather than ten, and only because the middle stretch of squabbling is a genuine slog. It is meant to be.