Diaries as a Source for the History of Sexuality: Samuel Pepys, Anne Lister, and Roger Casement

In the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, most diarists did not write about sex, and when they did, they were often cryptic and brief. This chapter will discuss three well-known British diarists who did write about their sex lives: Samuel Pepys, a seventeenth-century admiralty official who had sex with many women, Anne Lister, an early nineteenth-century Yorkshire gentlewoman, and lover of women, and Roger Casement, an early-twentieth-century human rights campaigner and Irish nationalist who enjoyed having sex with men on his travels. This chapter will consider the usefulness of diaries as a source, how the authors wrote about sex, how they were typical or atypical, what they thought about their sexual identities if anything, the power relations of these interactions, and controversies about their publication history.