British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries is the largest collection of British and Irish women's diaries and correspondence ever assembled. Spanning more than 300 years, it brings the personal experiences of nearly 500 women to researchers, students, and general readers.

The uses for the collection will be many and varied. For historians, sociologists, students of literature, researchers in genealogy, and others, British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries will prove a dramatic new resource. These diaries bring us much more than the personal. They provide a detailed record of what women wore, the conditions under which they worked, what they ate, what they read, and how they amused themselves. We can see how frequently they attended church, how they viewed their connection to God, and how they prayed. We can explore their relationships with lovers and family and friends. William Matthews, an early scholar in this field, observed:

"I believe the diary to be a unique kind of writing; all other forms of writing envisage readers, and so are adapted to readers, by interpretation, order, simplification, rationalization, omission, addition, and the endless devices of exposition . . . [diaries] are in general the most immediate, truthful, and revealing documents available. . ."

The collection has been developed alongside North American Women's Letters and Diaries, which uses the same software and indexing to provide access to more than 150,000 pages of American material from Colonial times to 1950.

The contents have been selected from the bibliographies listed below as well as other sources.

The material for British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries has been selected according to a number of strict criteria. Initially, we consulted a number of leading bibliographies, which provided a basis from which we could begin to license and acquire materials.

• Women's Diaries, Journals, and Letters: an annotated bibliography, Cheryl Cline, Garland, 1989
• And So to Bed: a bibliography of diaries published in English. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987
• 800 years of women's letters, Olga Kenyon ; foreword by P.D. James. Boston : Faber and Faber, 1993
• Personal writings by women to 1900 : a bibliography of American and British writers, compiled by Gwenn Davis and Beverly A. Joyce. 1st University of Oklahoma Press ed. Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.
• Centuries of female days : Englishwomen's private diaries, Harriet Blodgett. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c1988.

• Authors must be women and must have been resident in Ireland or the British Isles for a significant time.
• Materials must have been written contemporaneously. Memoirs and autobiographical material are excluded, unless they are considered of particular value.
• Letters written after 1950 are excluded.
• Diaries that began before 1950 are included until they are complete. Diaries that began after 1950 are excluded.
• Letters written by men are excluded, even when they are part of a source work.

Our goal is to have no errors in this database.   To this end we are interested in hearing about any errors you may find.

Below are known errors in this release of the database which will be rectified in the next release.

• There are no known errors in the database at this time.

British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries is optimized to operate with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 or higher, and Firefox 3.0. (We are aware that the "select terms" feature of our Find and Search is not performing well in Firefox 3.5.2. Upgrading to the latest version of Firefox will resolve this issue.)

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Appendix A

• The Customer is XXXX
• The Site is XXXXX
• Authorized Users are the Customer's currently enrolled full-time or part-time students, employees, faculty, staff, affiliated researchers, distance learners, visiting scholars, and walk-in patrons who are physically present at the Site.
• Nominated technical support staff is XXXXX

British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries was made possible through the hard work of the following individuals:
 

Our goal is to create a unique archive of letters and diaries according to the editorial criteria expressed above. We welcome contributions from organizations and individuals, especially if you have materials that are unpublished or of unique interest. Submitting materials to our editors is easy and without obligation on your part. If you have collections of substantial value, we may be able to pay you a royalty in return for the rights to use them.

• To submit materials for inclusion in BWL, please email the Editor at Editor@AlexanderStreet.com or mail them to him at 3212 Duke Street,  Alexandria, VA 22314.
   
• If you are a commercial publisher who would like to discuss licensing materials for inclusion in the database, please contact the Editor at Editor@AlexanderStreet.com or 1-800-889-5937 or 1-703-212-8522.
   
• To report factual errors or to suggest improvements, please email us at Editor@AlexanderStreet.com. Please include the author, the document, and the page number. Please also include your email address so that we can let you know the status of your correction.

All materials in British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries are protected under U.S. and International Copyright Law. Fair use under the law permits reproduction of single copies for personal research and private use. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of protected items requires the written permission of the copyright owners.

Texts produced for British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries are considered research materials and receive the same level of stewardship as books, paper documents, and photographs. Once complete, copies of the database will be given to all purchasing institutions, so ensuring that the materials are available to subsequent generations.

MARC records are now available for this collection. Records will point to each book, series or manuscript. This will enable patrons to link directly from a public access catalog to all documents pertaining to that publication.