"... this slim, beflanneled, perversion of masculinity ..."

Does it include personal journals or diaries? How do you weight those?

Thank you!

Oh, of course I should have explained that, sorry. An ego document is anything written by the person about their life, so that is things like travel journals, autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries. Anything basically written in the first person as a narrative about themselves, which sets it apart from correspondence.

How you weigh those depends on a lot of factors. I would contend that they require a thorough knowledge of a historical figure too, because you need to recognize their tone and mannerisms and be able to extrapolate.

For example, a diary. You need to ask the question of if they are writing for themselves or an imagined future audience. If you think "but diaries are private" well....some people do write them with an eye towards posterity, if someone thinks they are important enough. But then you have people like my guy who seems to genuinely be someone who processes his thoughts by writing them out, and so keeps journals and notes habitually. I can tell that he didn't really think of them as public-facing documents because the travel journals he wrote with the intent of publishing them read very differently.

People keep diaries in an astonishing variety of ways, so what you can get out of them really depends on the person, and how well or completely they keep track of their own life. I also would be cautious assuming that the things they say in those (or in private letters) are things they would say to other people. I see this a lot: people will quote Empress Elisabeth or Queen Victoria being harsh about someone in very private papers and then extrapolate that they were mean or harsh in person. Sometimes inside thoughts are inside thoughts, and they don't go further than writing something in a diary.

An autobiography or a memoir carries a different intention than strictly private papers, and may include more conscious self-representation (again, not lying exactly, but cultivating how they want to be seen) and selective story telling. Then you need to be able to pick out which parts are their public-facing persona or an idealized form of themselves.