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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Kathryn Carter, ed., The Small Details of Life: 20 Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830–1996 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2002).

WITH THIS VOLUME, Kathryn Carter addresses "the need for a Canadian collection of women's diaries." (ix) "The premise underlying this work is that the best history is biography and that reading the details from lives of individual women can do much to broaden and challenge our understanding of Canadian history." (6) The professional historian will demur that it does not necessarily follow that the best history is autobiography, in which category diaries, insofar as they are a construction of self, rightly belong. Yet Carter is moving beyond a narrow scholarly understanding of history, and "encouraged contributors ... to get away from the notion that the diary is of service mainly to social history," directing attention instead "to the ways in which and the conditions under which these texts are written." In their separate and distinctive ways, her contributors, whose background and expertise, ranging from English literature through history, women's studies, and educational studies to dramatic theory, reflect today's broad interdisciplinary interest in diaries, did just that.

In her introduction, Carter anticipates potential challenges, providing a thoughtful justification for all the reservations readers may have, yet without quite resolving the issues in which those reservations are grounded. To the purist who wonders at the inclusion of Dorothy Duncan MacLennan, wife of the redoubtable Hugh, a woman raised in the United States, who, in many ways, considered herself an "outsider," she responds that this is a "collection of excerpts from diaries written ... by twenty women who are Canadian or who wrote in what is currently called Canada." (4) "The selections are not meant to be equivalent to one another in any sense," but rather "represent some of the widely varying functions of diary writing and constitute an eclectic group designed to stimulate discussion."(9) Scholarly and general readers will appreciate the editor's decision to include "chunks of diaries," rather than edited excerpts. (8) Acknowledging the need, or perhaps anticipating the scholarly reader's desire, for an overarching or even an underlying theme, Carter resorts to "two fictions to structure this collection" first a narrative, "the story of an artist's [diarist's] growth to maturity." (10) Thus we move from "turbulent beginnings" through "conflict and confusion," "hesitation and pause," "exploration," "love, loss, and work," to "reflective endings." This might have worked effectively had the editor not resorted to the second fiction, a chronological implication organization, on the grounds that "diaries are in dialogue with history." (10) The inescapable implication that early diarists represent "turbulent beginnings" while present-day diarists represent "reflective endings" is not altogether satisfying.

Yet The Small Details of Life is a thoroughly enjoyable book, testimony that "the dense, rich fruit of the diary is the seemingly minor details nestled among "big" events." (20) The diaries are made more accessible by the introductions; clearly, the contributors were in dialogue with their diaries. Perhaps for this very reason, the introductions are as eclectic and varied in their approaches as are the diaries. This does not mean that they are uneven, for they are all engaging and useful. Indeed, Carter deserves high praise for the quality of the editing, with each contribution a separate little gem. I found no errors of style and only one of substance: universities opened their doors to women in the 1870s, not in the 1860s, with Mount Allison leading the way in 1872. (15)

The approach is multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary despite a few specific points of meeting among the contributors. All attempted to provide a sense of the historical milieu in which the diary was written. Most also considered the extent to which their particular diary represented a construction of self. S. Leigh Matthews' introduction to the 1830 diary of Frances Ramsay Simpson succeeds in situating Simpson very effectively within the broader historical context, while also raising just enough issues about Simpson herself and the cultural and personal forces at work. More often, however, the balance is tenuous. The academic reader might have wished that the contributors had read each others's introductions, as it is only through cross-pollination that interdisciplinarity can reach full flower. Dialogue among contributors might have served to highlight consistencies or to resolve apparent contradictions. Robynne Rogers Healey, in her introduction to the diary of Sarah Welch Hill, offers the useful caution that "single diary excerpts should not be taken out of context and assumptions made about an entire life based on one or two entries," (57) a point reinforced by Edna Staebler's comments with reference to her own diaries. (454–56) The reader wonders whether this caution would apply equally to the Crease women, Susan Nagle, Constance Kerr Sissons, Caroline Alice Porter, or Mary Eidse Friesen, all of whom, like Hill and Staebler, kept diaries over long periods. On another level, as Carter points out, "the expectations and norms of a culture or community at a given historical moment will inflect diary content." (10–11) How then, to reconcile the striking contrast between the diaries of two women writing at the same historical moment, in 1901? Rosalind Kerr characterizes the diary of Constance Kerr Sissons as fairly typical of a period when women's journals were "expected to enhance the public reputation of the family of the writer." (186) Writing in the same year, Phoebe McInnes, unlike Sissons, fails "to censor scandalous family secrets." (186) Perhaps the explanation lies in class or community. Yet K. Jane Watt's introduction to the McInnes diary provides compelling evidence of women's new freedom and changing societal attitudes during an era that saw the advent of the bicycle and a concomitant change in women's fashions. That new freedom signalled increased opportunities for women, reflected in the growing number of career women after the turn of the century, a societal shift mirrored in the lives of the volume's later diarists: journalist Miriam Green Ellis, poet and book illustrator Dorothy Choate Herriman, novelist Marian Engel, and writer Edna Staebler.

This is truly a Canadian collection and, taken together, the diaries tell a uniquely Canadian story. The diarists represent a broad spectrum of Canadian society, ranging from the wealthy Mina Wylie to Elsie Rogstad Jones who came of age on a Depression-era Saskatchewan farm, from the well-known author Marian Engel to the otherwise invisible Mary Dulhanty preparing for life as a "working girl" in the 1920s. Above all, these women reflect the shifting Canadian demographic. Among the early diarists, only New Brunswick's seagoing Amelia Holder had long-established roots in her community. Sarah Welch Hill was one among many British gentlewomen of her generation to settle in southern Ontario. In the far west, British Columbia was colonized, first by the British, represented here by the Nagles and the Creases, and then by central and eastern Canadians, such as the McInneses. On the Prairies, Caroline Alice Porter, whose diaries "give us an extraordinary glimpse of a prairie family," (242) was raised in Prince Edward Island. She and others like her helped "Canadianize" the American, Norwegian, and Mennonite settlers who came after, represented here by the Puckettes, the Rogstads, and the Friesens. As Kathryn Carter states in her introduction, this is a book for anyone who has stood in a cemetery reading the brief epitaph of an unknown woman, wondering at the details: What pleasures did her body know? What losses did she survive? What was the rhythm of her day?" (4) It will, as Carter hoped, stimulate discussion.


Gail G. Campbell University of New Brunswick

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