Because Frank is such a beloved figure, Prose has encountered some resistance to her book.
“Many people have a very passionate and, in some cases, territorial response to Anne Frank. Some have been receptive to the idea of her as a conscious writer, whereas others are so wedded to the notion of her spontaneity and innocence that it’s been very difficult for them to accept even this slight revision in their view of who she was.”
Generations of schoolchildren have read and recognized their own experiences in the words of Anne Frank, finding surprising commonalities with this young girl despite the passage of generations and the unique horror of her situation. But according to Francine Prose’s fascinating new account of the writing of Frank’s diary, our veneration of her outpourings has eclipsed a proper assessment of Anne Frank — conscientious author.
“We haven’t given Anne Frank credit,” Prose says. “We just assume that she scribbled in this book every few days and it got left behind, but she was a very conscious writer.”
As Prose describes in “Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife,” the book was not merely a teenager’s daily reminiscences, but a thoughtfully penned and, most importantly, artfully revised book that Frank intended to be published as “Het Achterhuis (The Annex).”
She also examines the way in which the book has been interpreted and misinterpreted in the decades since its discovery — through classroom approaches and its traumatic adaptation into the well-known play and film — which, she says, distort the diary’s true intentions.
Prose insists that the revelations in her book only add luster to Frank’s formidable legacy. “She had an extraordinary natural gift,” Prose says, “but in addition to that, she worked on her craft. It’s not as if she was someone who could just scrawl a bunch of words, and they turn out to be ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’.”