'Strong' UK interest as Patricia Highsmith's diaries up for sale

Several UK publishers have their eyes on the UK rights to novelist Patricia Highsmith’s extensive diaries, which will for the first time tell of the author’s “heart-break, difficult choices, hard-won professional triumphs and a furiously fast-paced social life”.

Zurich-based press Diogenes Verlag, which controls the American author’s literary estate, has one UK offer already on the table, following the sale of the US rights to Liveright.

Rights director Susanne Bauknecht told The Bookseller: “At the moment we only have a deal in the US, but there is great interest in the UK.”

Diogenes Verlag founder and the author’s German-language publisher Daniel Keel and Highsmith’s Diogenes editor Anna von Planta discovered the diaries following her death in 1995, hidden behind bedclothes and towels in her home in Ticino, Switzerland. The personal accounts have since been kept in the Swiss Literary Archives and viewed by a “handful of scholars and biographers”, according to the New York Times, but are being released around the centenary of the author's birth in 2021.

According to the W W Norton & Company imprint, the 8,000 pages of diaries and notebooks span the Texas native’s adult life from 1938 during her freshman year at Barnard, through her professional writing career until her death in 1995. The Guardian, covering the US deal, said the diaries cover her thoughts on writing, struggles with her sexuality, a sexual encounter with the writer Arthur Koestler which she calls a “miserable, joyless episode”, as well as her later racist and misogynistic views.

Von Planta said: “What amazed and touched me most when delving into the diaries and notebooks was to discover the raw and unrestrained voice of the young Pat (self-conscious in her early notebooks, in which she hatched her first stories; often gushing in her diaries, which tell of frequent heart-break, difficult choices, hard-won professional triumphs and a furiously fast-paced social life). It was to witness the painful becoming of Patricia Highsmith.”

Liveright have edited the manuscripts down to 650 pages of text and Highsmith’s own drawings and watercolors and will publish in the US in the centenary of the author’s birth in 2021. Virago Modern Classics acquired the rights to Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, and Strangers on a Train in 2015. The rights to Carol, originally titled The Price of Salt and written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, sit with Bloomsbury.