Most of the journals I have read were kept alone. One person, one notebook, the quiet circuit of a single mind. But the longer I have spent in archives, the more I have noticed a quieter tradition – couples and small families who passed a notebook back and forth, alternating handwriting on the same page.
These shared notebooks are strange artifacts. Part diary, part love letter, part inside joke, part working manuscript. They almost always outlast whatever conversation produced them.
Here are four I keep returning to: a runaway poet and his teenage lover, four siblings inventing countries on sugar-bag paper, a diplomat and a cook touring postwar Europe, and a husband-and-wife pair who turned fifty years of research into eleven volumes of history. If you want the broader pattern across the journaling habits of successful people, that is the hub. This piece is about what changes when the notebook is “ours” rather than “mine.”
1. Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley – The Green Notebook in Paris
In the summer of 1814, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was sixteen and had just run away with a married, expelled, debt-ridden poet named Percy Bysshe Shelley. They made it to Paris and bought a small green notebook to hold the record of their shared life.
For a while, both of them wrote in it. On one of their first mornings on the French coast, Percy writes:
I said-Mary look. the sun rises over france [sic]. we walked over the sands to the Inn. We were shewn into an apartment that answered the purpose both of sitting & sleeping room. Mary was there.
Mary, reading over his shoulder, adds the perfect deadpan correction:
Shelley was also with me.
You can hear a whole marriage in that line – the affection, the eye-roll, the editorial instinct that would later turn Mary into the author of Frankenstein and Percy’s posthumous editor.
Over time, Percy’s enthusiasm faded and Mary became the principal keeper. The first page once read “Shelley and Mary’s journal book”; later, Mary squeezed the word “not” in above his name. She developed a small private code – a sun, a crescent moon, other glyphs – to refer to her stepsister Claire Clairmont, whose presence caused most of their unhappiness. The editors of The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844 (Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, Clarendon Press, 1987) admit they can only guess at what some of the symbols mean.
The notebook also doubled as the working log of Frankenstein. Mary records progress with a single verb, “write.” When the manuscript is rejected: “Frank.[enstein] sent back.” When Lackington accepts it: “A letter from Lackington.” The diary registers events; it does not perform feelings.
The shared notebook outlasted Percy. After he drowned off the Italian coast in 1822, Mary closed the volume and opened another, writing:
On the Eighth of July I finished my journal. This is a curious coincidence – The date still remains, the fatal 8th – a monument to shew that all ended then. And I begin again? – oh never!
The Bodleian holds most of the surviving Shelley papers as the Abinger collection. It is the most honest shared diary I have read, partly because it kept being honest after the sharing stopped. The Shelleys remind me of Einstein’s habit of treating his notebooks as a thinking partner. The notebook becomes a third person in the relationship.
2. The Brontë Siblings – “Scribble Mania” in Miniature
The Brontës were not a couple, but they belong on this list because their shared notebook habit is one of the strangest and most productive in literary history. Four children, one parsonage, one dining-room table, two decades of quiet competition.
It started in 1826, when their father came back from a trip with toy soldiers for Branwell, ninepins for Charlotte, a dancing doll for Anne, and a toy village for Emily. By the next morning, the children had named the soldiers – Charlotte’s after the Duke of Wellington, Branwell’s, cheekily, after Napoleon – and started writing stories about them.
Over the next ten years they produced hundreds of hand-sewn miniature books, scaled to fit the toy soldiers, with covers repurposed from sugar bags, wallpaper, and newsprint. Many are held today at the Houghton Library at Harvard and the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Those hand-sewn little books have their own post on the site. Charlotte and Branwell built the imaginary world of Angria; Emily and Anne built Gondal.
These were not isolated diaries. They were the workshop. Charlotte described the family habit with a phrase that has stuck with me: “scribble mania.” In a letter from Brussels in 1843, she writes that her brother
might indeed talk of scribble mania if he were to see me just now, encompassed by [students]…all wondering why I write with my eyes shut-staring, gaping-hang their astonishment.
They also wrote in the margins of every book they owned. Charlotte, homesick in Brussels, scrawled a small diary on a blank page of Russell’s General Atlas of Modern Geography:
Brussels-Saturday morning Oct. 12th 1843-First Class-I am very cold-there is no fire-I wish I were at home With Papa-Branwell Emily-Anne and Tabby-I am tired of being among foreigners it is a dreary life…
Their biographer Elizabeth Gaskell, quoted in Juliet Barker’s The Brontës (Little, Brown, 2010), describes the nightly ritual: the sisters wrote in close collaboration, reading aloud and walking round and round the dining-room table each evening. After Emily and Anne died, Charlotte kept walking round the table alone.
Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey were not solo bolts from the blue. They were the visible top layer of a twenty-year shared notebook habit. Their juvenile playfulness reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, where drawings, lists, and sketches share a page. Much adult work begins as play.
3. Julia and Paul Child – Notebooks Across Postwar Europe
Julia and Paul Child are my favorite couple on this list, partly because their notebooks are so domestic and partly because they are so visibly two minds working in parallel.
Paul was an artist and a U.S. Foreign Service officer. After World War II his postings took the couple to Paris, Marseille, Bonn, Oslo, and Washington. He carried notebooks everywhere, filling them with lists, sketches of street scenes, and watercolor studies. Julia carried a different kind of notebook – one in which she was teaching herself to cook, recipe by recipe, often in the same kitchen Paul was sketching.
Their papers are held at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, which holds her recipe-testing notebooks for Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The testing pages are the interesting part: attempts dated, repeated, and marked up in her square, decisive handwriting until a method finally worked. A recipe was not finished when it tasted good once. It was finished when she could reproduce it.
Julia’s notebooks are a working laboratory. Paul’s are an aesthete’s travel diary. Together they cover the same years from different angles. Neither tried to merge their notebooks. They lived in the same apartments, ate at the same table, and kept separate books. The sharing happened in the margins: they read each other’s pages, illustrated each other’s projects. Paul’s letters to his twin brother Charlie often include sketches of Julia at the stove.
You do not need one notebook to journal as a couple. You need two, both honest, occasionally pooled. The Childs’ habit is closer to the way Bruce Lee used his journals as a private training log – parallel records that meet at the dinner table, not on the page.
The Durants are the most ambitious couple on this list. Will and Ariel Durant were married for sixty-eight years until they died within two weeks of each other in 1981. Their output was The Story of Civilization: eleven volumes, roughly 14,000 pages, published between 1935 and 1975.
It was a shared notebook project from start to finish. Will did most of the early writing alone, but by Volume VII, The Age of Reason Begins (1961), Ariel was a credited co-author. Their working method, described in A Dual Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 1977), involved a shared note-taking system that ran for decades. Will would assign Ariel a stack of secondary sources; she would build dossiers of quotations, dates, and index cards; he would draft from her dossiers; they would revise together. The arrangement was invisible on the covers for twenty-six years, and then it was not: from The Age of Reason Begins onward her name is on the book, and the two of them shared the 1968 Pulitzer for Rousseau and Revolution.
The Will and Ariel Durant Foundation maintains the manuscripts; other materials are at UCLA and various university archives. The surviving working drafts show two distinct hands annotating the same paragraphs – Will’s looser script and Ariel’s smaller, denser revisions. Their shared notebook was less a single book than a system: thousands of cards, dossiers, drafts, and rolling outlines kept in a shared study in Los Angeles for nearly five decades.
What I take from the Durants is patience. The shared notebook does not have to be a single bound volume. It can be a method that quietly accretes over years. Their practice has more in common with the patient, structured note-taking of Benjamin Franklin and the workshop habit of Thomas Edison’s 3,500 notebooks than with a romantic shared diary. The shared part is not the page; it is the project.
A shared notebook is rarely an even split. One partner usually carries the bulk of the writing while the other contributes corrections, drawings, lists, or the occasional perfect one-liner. Mary did most of the Shelley journal. Charlotte and Emily did more of the Brontë juvenilia than Anne or Branwell. Julia wrote the recipes; Paul drew the kitchen. Will did the prose; Ariel did the dossiers. The asymmetry is not a problem; it is what makes the book interesting.
A shared notebook also survives the relationship. The Shelley journal kept going after Percy drowned. The Brontë siblings’ miniature books survived the siblings themselves. The Childs’ archive is now studied by historians who never met them. The Durants’ index cards outlasted their marriage.
If you are thinking about starting a shared journal, the easiest version is the Childs’ model: two notebooks, one shelf, occasional pooling. The most ambitious is the Durants’ model: a shared system that lasts decades. I would not start with the Shelleys.
I write a letter analyzing the journals of one accomplished person (or couple, or family) and pull out the habits anyone can borrow. No spam, no hype, just one letter and a quiet pause to think. You can sign up here.
If you want to go further, my Udemy course The Daily Journal – Habit of Successful People walks through the notebook habit step by step, with more than 36,700 students enrolled. Many of the lessons translate directly to keeping a journal with a partner. You might also enjoy the disciplined notebooks of Martin Luther King Jr. – another reminder that a journal does its best work when it has a job.
For more shared and solo formats, see journal examples.
Want a modern page format after reading these couples? Start with how to choose a journal style.
If you want to start a shared or solo practice after reading these pairs, the beginner’s guide is the shortest on-ramp.
For another tradition of private pages that shaped public work, see notebooks of the civil rights movement. Prefer a map of paths? Open Start Here.
Featured image: Ariel and Will Durant in the library of their Los Angeles home, 24 September 1967. Their Pulitzer-winning Rousseau and Revolution sits in the foreground, credited to both of them, with The Age of Voltaire on the shelf behind. Photo by Bill Murphy for the Los Angeles Times, UCLA Library Digital Collections, CC BY 4.0.
