Antonia White, born Eirene Botting in 1899, was a British writer who won plaudits for Frost in May, a semi-autobiographical novel published in 1933 in which her experiences in a Catholic convent school were vividly depicted. At this point in her life, White had been married three times, and she had two young daughters who would both, after White’s death in 1980, publish memoirs about their destructive relationships with their mother. One of those daughters, Susan Chitty, edited her mother’s diaries for publication in the early 1990s, and it’s from the first of those two volumes that this entry comes: a list of likes and hates to close 1934, a year that had been particularly rewarding for White, professionally, with the success of Frost in May establishing her as a significant voice in British literature.

The Diary Entry

30 Dec

Likes

Clean clothes…
Being out of debt…
Sitting at café tables…
Starting a relationship…
Decorating rooms…
Nice surprises…
Sound of crockery when someone is getting tea for me…
Receiving love letters…
Summer and summer clothes…

Hates

Feeling fat…
Dirt, especially in my clothes…
My mother’s sweetish corruption…
Cold and draughts…
The hours between lunch and tea…
Meeting people in the street unexpectedly…
Being pregnant…
Crossing roads…
Cheery people…
Cold tea…
People who gush at me and don’t really like me…
Finding people out when I phone them…
People who automatically ask first ‘How are the children?’
Talking politics…

WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO HAPPEN

Tom to fall in love with me…
To be clear once and for all of the Catholic Church…

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Further Reading

As I mentioned, Antonia White’s diaries were posthumously edited by her eldest daughter, Susan Chitty, and published in two volumes:

• Diaries, Volume One, 1926-1957 (published in 1991)
• Diaries, Volume Two, 1958-1979 (published in 1992)

Also…

• Antonia White at Wikipedia
• Susan Chitty at Wikipedia
• My years of hell growing up with a mother inferior (Guardian)