This chapter studies the neglected diaries of Mary Watts and Evelyn De Morgan in conjunction for the first time. Excerpts from Mary's eight extant diaries (1887, 1891, 1893, 1896, 1898, 1902, 1904 and 1906–8) were recently published (Greenhow 2016b) on the completion of a collaborative transcription process, over a century after they were written. Yet the majority of Mary's diary writing remains unpublished, as does Evelyn's one extant diary (1872). This chapter includes an analysis of my own transcriptions of Mary's diaries and of Evelyn's diary, bringing to light previously unseen archival material in order to assist the recovery and revival of women's marginalised life writing. Despite the disparity in volume and the production of them during different stages of life (Mary's in married middle age; Evelyn's in unmarried adolescence), their similarity as Victorian women artists’ diaries – recording interests in interdisciplinary creative practices and tracing the evolution of professional as well as feminist identities – calls for a comparison. A reading of Mary's multiple, detailed diaries informs a reading of Evelyn's relatively short, single diary, and the significance of the latter is highlighted through comparison with the former. I aim to show how these women artists’ narratives, views and voices relate to each other and to other women's diaries and life writing of the period, challenging traditional assumptions about these women as well as ideological assumptions about Victorian women writers.

Mary's and Evelyn's diaries register their private resistance to Victorian feminine norms, document their professionalisation as woman artists, and trace the emergence of their distinctly feminist voices. They are sites of artistic inception, and each can be read in its entirety as a fragmented or truncated Victorian künstlerroman (that is, a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity). Combining word and design, Mary's diary narrative logs her first experiments with gesso and photography in 1887, and the creation of her ceiling panels and reading alcove at Limnerslease in 1891, tracing the formation of her artworks. Evelyn's diary logs her early training at the South Kensington National Art Training School in 1872 (then aged 16–17) before joining the Slade; her last diary entry marks her ‘last day at Kensington’ (1872: 20 December).