THE RED LEATHER DIARY
Lily Koppel
Harper Perennial, $24.99, pbk
Billed as "Sex in the City in the 1900s", this is the true story of the life of Florence Wolfson, a woman who grew up in New York city at the beginning of the last century and how her diary was found by a modern young woman who set out to locate Florence and find out how the story ends.
The story opens with the author saving an old cabin trunk from a dumpster outside her New York apartment and looking through it.
There were some wonderful 1920s clothes and a diary with a red leather cover.
Lily, a journalist, reads it and is inspired and fascinated.
The two women do eventually meet and the book is told through extracts from the diary and her conversations with Florence and pictures from the family album.
Florence's parents were Jewish immigrants, her father a doctor and her mother a fashion designer. Florence was very intelligent and keen on the arts and had great dreams for herself.
She was given the diary by a friend on her 13th birthday and from then on wrote in it every day about her life.
Maybe her story is not unique but throughout the book we get a picture of a determined woman who has great loves and passions for the arts and various people.
She struggles against the expectation that she will marry a good Jewish boy, and the various social snobberies of the times.
There are some wonderful scenes from summer camp where Florence's mother quite blatantly sends her to find a possible husband.
In the meantime, Florence falls in love with a number of women, is the editor of her university magazine, goes to Europe and meets a count etc.
It is easy to see why the author latches on to Florence's seemingly glamorous lifestyle and rebellious personality.
And it is wonderful that they do get to meet each other and to become friends.
Florence is delighted to see her diary again and to meet her young self through reading its pages.
I'd recommend this for readers in their teens who are still trying to find themselves and want to learn about the world and are at the same point in their lives as Florence was when she was writing in her red-leather diary.
- Sophie Fern is a university teaching fellow.
