“Keep out/Keep out/Your snooting snout…”: The Irresistible Journals of Elizabeth Smart

[para. 1]: "Bill said write all the time keep a diary-so here it is" (5). So here it is that on March 6, 1933, the twenty year old Elizabeth Smart introduced her diary to an as yet unidentified audience. Years later, on March 1, 1940, she revealed just what this diary had come to represent: "But this my book I carry everywhere, and its blank unwritten pages and shabby cover-its menial use for dancing notes, addresses, and accounts deglamourize it. I must not forget IT is my heavenly key-my work my purpose" (239-40). Elizabeth Smart's "purpose"-her diary was one that sustained her throughout her adult life. In fact, it was so clearly her "work" that towards the end of her life she set about having these extensive volumes published. In 1982, Smart was working as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. Smart's colleague, Alice Van Wart, explains: "While visiting her in her office one day, I noticed on her desk formidable piles of paper, which she informed me were the transcripts of her journals" (Necessary intro.). After Van Wart expressed an interest in these papers, Smart phoned her a few months later and asked her to edit them. She accepted the proposal, and in 1986 Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart appeared. Though, unfortunately, Smart died while the work was in production, Rosemary Sullivan confirms in her biography, By Heart, that Smart had "proofread the manuscript" and "was pleased with it" (378)."