The Diary of a Young Girl

“Like all great art, it reveals something about the individual hand that created it, and something about what it means to be a human being—in this case, what is required to maintain human decency and compassion in the most inhuman and dehumanizing circumstances.” 

In the Introduction Francine Post argues that The Diary of a Young Girl should be seen as a literary classic. She sees the book as more than a historical document that captures a specific time, place, and event. Instead, she argues that it offers a transcendent look at being human, meaning that it has insight into life that is not bound to the time and place it was written.

“Considering how far we watch Anne travel within the confines of that claustrophobic space, considering her astonishing change from a little girl to a young woman, how could it have been possible that the little girl wrote almost exactly as the young woman did, so that Anne’s literary voice remained, in essence, the same? The answer is that during her final months in the attic, Anne herself revised and edited the sections she had written throughout her years in hiding.” 

This quote explains a very important point that anyone discussing The Diary of a Young Girl must keep in mind: Though it is a diary, the book is not a pure chronicle of Anne’s daily thoughts and experiences. It has been edited and rewritten, especially by Anne herself. The diary’s overall voice reflects the older, more mature Anne who lived in 1944, not the girl who first entered the Secret Annex.

“And it can only deepen our admiration to know that this book, which has been universally read and admired, this intensely personal memoir which over time has become emblematic of the sufferings of so many millions, is not simply the spontaneous, accidental outpourings of a young girl’s heart but rather a consciously crafted work of literature. Anne Frank’s diary is as expertly written, as beautiful, and as powerful as she must have intended, when, in the final months of a life that would so soon be cut short, she labored, like any artist, to fashion something solid and enduring from her dream of what she so urgently wanted her book to be.” 

Despite the revisions to The Diary of a Young Girl, Francine Post argues that it should be seen as a literary masterwork. Even with the revisions, it still captures Anne’s viewpoint. In fact, Post implies that the revisions make it even more of a literary classic, as they mean Anne took care in shaping the diary’s