The small details of a life : twenty diaries by women in Canada, 1830-1996

the small details of LIFE twenty diaries by women in Canada, 1830Canada, -1996 This rich anthology presents twenty diary excerpts written between 1830 and 1996, reflecting the upper-class travails of nineteenthcentury travellers and settlers as well as the workaday struggles and triumphs of twentieth-century students, teachers, housewives, and writers. The diarists are single, married, with children and without, and range in age from fourteen to ninety years old. The excerpts -each preceded by a biographical sketch of the diarist -make compelling reading. Elsie Rogstad Jones endures the sudden death of her baby in 1943; Constance Kerr Sissons, writing in 1900, discovers that her husband already has a Metis wife 'a la fa$on du pays'; and Dorothy Duncan MacLennan ruminates on her married life with Hugh MacLennan in 1950s Montreal. Writers Marian Engel, Edna Staebler, and Dorothy Choate Herriman contemplate the creative process. Two diarists, Phoebe Mclnnes and Sophie Alice Puckette, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, reveal the contradictions and difficulties of their lives as unmarried schoolteachers. In an excerpt from a diary written in 1843, Sarah Welch Hill, a newly arrived settler, describes her violent marriage in what must be one of the few nineteenth-century documents describing domestic abuse in the first person. With an introduction that examines diary writing by women in Canada from a historical and theoretical perspective, The Small Details of Life represents a significant contribution to the fields of Canadian women's history and life-writing. It enriches our understanding of women's literature in Canada, especially the strong tradition of personal non-fiction writing, and provides compelling glimpses into the lives of a range of Canadian women. x Acknowledgments Rogstad Jones -I thank you for your bravery in sharing your writing with a wider audience than you had likely anticipated. Like many diary manuscripts, this manuscript went on a circuitous journey involving life changes and physical relocations. Just after putting out a call for contributions, I discovered that I was pregnant with my first child; she and the contributions all arrived in the middle of January 1998. Barely beginning motherhood and the book, we uprooted and moved to the United States. I packed up the manuscript and moved it from dry Edmonton to humid Durham, North Carolina. Then, eighteen months later, the growing file of papers and notes were transplanted again, to Ontario, where the book finally reached maturity. I was always keenly, though theoretically, aware that material conditions affect the creation of any written work, but that awareness translated into acute personal experience as I packed and unpacked the piles of papers in each new location, and as I learned to accommodate my writing schedule to an infant's sleeping and eating habits. A new respect grew for those women who enjoyed large families, managed busy households, suffered dislocations, and still made time to write in their diaries. The small details of life do indeed interrupt and shape all of our writing activities. I am indebted to Bill Harnum and Gerry Hallowell at the University of Toronto Press, who first agreed that a book like this was needed. Jill McConkey, Siobhan McMenemy, Frances Mundy, and Barbara Tessman were gentle guides as this book went through its process of becoming. Three anonymous readers offered incisive comments for which I am very grateful. George Elliott Clarke and Uma Parameswaran graciously shared research and ideas. In North Carolina, this project benefited from the support of Jean O'Barr in women's studies and John Herd Thompson in the North America Program at Duke University. At Duke, I found supportive readers in Roxane Head Dinkin and Monica Russel y Rodriguez, who broadened my horizons by introducing perspectives from psychology and anthropology. I am also grateful to Suzanne Bunkers, Isobel 4 Small Details of Life everything shrinking to the smallest thinnest letter, I. Lorna Crozier, 'Not the Music' In Sinclair Ross's 1941 novel As for Me and My House, Mrs Philip Bentley keeps a diary as she navigates the rocky shoals of married life during the Depression in a fictional small prairie town called Horizon. Lorna Crozier's poem imagines the importance of such writing for Mrs Bentley: how it moves her ambiguously towards forgiveness (which might be as absent as the rain); how it functions as a sacred place, a saving place; how it sustains a diminishing self. Crozier calls it a journal. I call it a diary. Whatever it is called, it comprises the act of writing down the details of a life -for a few days, a few weeks, or a few years -and it often has tremendous value for the writer and her readers. This is a collection of excerpts from diaries written between 1830 and 1996 by twenty women who are Canadian or who wrote in what is currently called Canada. A few of the names will be familiar from the worlds of history, art, or literature, but most are not. The choice to present writing by women who are not necessarily 'names' is deliberate. 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? This collection presents the extraordinary daily achievements of allegedly ordinary women. It seeks to enrich the history of Canada with the voices of 'unknown' women who lived from coast to coast, and urges readers to become acquainted with the rhythm of women's days and women's work. The writings range from the upper-class travails of nineteenth-century travellers and settlers to the workaday struggles and triumphs of twentieth-century students, teachers, housewives, and writers. In words and in silences, these excerpts JO Small Details of Life writing by Dorothy Choate Herriman and Marian Engel, who are more comfortable with and more conversant in literary techniques; both authors strive to achieve what they see as appropriate levels of self-critique and emotional expressiveness. Herriman is even selfconscious about her self-consciousness, apologetic about 'straining for "individuality".' But diaries are not always fluent in literary style, and after the reading the following selections, you may agree that diary writing is more energetic and direct when it lacks such fluency. I have resorted to two fictions to structure this collection, borrowing from thematic and chronological schemes. The first fiction is a narrative appropriated from the kunstlerroman (the story of an artist's growth to maturity), a shape deliberately and provocatively chosen to suggest that a woman diarist is the artist/creator of her life story. The excerpts proceed through an imagined series of stages that imply a process of growth, discovery, creation, and reflection. Putting pen to paper, this imaginary female diarist might proceed through turbulent beginnings and periods of conflict and confusion until, after a time of hesitation and pause, she gathers herself before setting out on a mental or physical adventure where she encounters love, loss, or vocation -maybe all three. She ends by reflecting, with comic or tragic undertones, on her life. The diary excerpts that appear under each heading are written, roughly, at these particular life stages. The kunstlerroman offers a useful fiction to shape this collection while maintaining respect for the idiosyncrasies and differences of the individual diarists and their power to create and fashion their own stories; in effect it names each diarist an artist. But it is a fictional shape, for every life has a unique pattern that cannot necessarily be mapped by any prototypical psychological journey. The second fiction underpinning this collection is a timeline. The excerpts are arranged in a chronological order proceeding from the earliest to the most recent because diaries are in dialogue with history. What I mean by this is that the expectations and norms of a culture or community at a given historical moment will to families in 1851 -slightly more than seven -was still remarkably high,' Alison Prentice et al., Canadian Women: A History, 2nd ed.

'I could scarcely hold myself together. I thought I must give way to my grief, so I hurried out, but when I got home and alone, I could just fall down and cry, I tried to pray but Oh I couldn't contain myself.' - Caroline Alice Porter, September 3rd, 1922, after the deaths of her youngest daughter, Jennie, and husband James within a single week in 1922.

This rich anthology presents twenty diary excerpts written between 1830 and 1996, covering the upper-class travails of nineteenth-century travelers and settlers to the workday struggles and triumphs of twentieth-century students, teachers, housewives, and writers. The diarists are single, married, with children and without, and, on at least one occasion, hiding love for another woman.

The excerpts - all preceded by a biographical sketch - make compelling reading. Elsie Rogstad Jones details the sudden death of her infant daughter in 1943; Constance Kerr Sissons, writing in 1900, discovers that her husband already has a Métis wife "à la façon du pays"; and Dorothy Duncan MacLennan ruminates on her married life with Hugh MacLennan in 1950s Montreal. Writers Marian Engel, Edna Staebler, and Dorothy Choate Herriman articulate their creative processes. Two diarists, Phoebe McInnes and Sophie Alice Puckette, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, sketch the contradictions and difficulties in the lives of single female teachers. In an excerpt from 1843, Sarah Welch Hill, a newly arrived settler to Canada describes her violent marriage in what must be one of the few documents describing nineteenth-century domestic abuse in the first person.

The Small Details of Life represents a significant contribution to the fields of Canadian women's history and life-writing, and enriches our understanding of women's literature in Canada, especially its tradition of non-fiction, personal writing by such women as Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, and Anna Jameson, among others.

Introduced with an examination of diary writing by women in Canada from a historical and theoretical perspective, the anthology also features contributions from two other significant diary scholars in Canada, Margaret Conrad and Barbara Powell.

"I could scarcely hold myself together. I thought I must give way to my grief, so I hurried out, but when I got home and alone, I could just fall down and cry, I tried to pray but Oh I couldn't contain myself."--Caroline Alice Porter, September 3rd, 1922, after the deaths of her youngest daughter, Jennie, and husband James within a single week in 1922. This rich anthology presents twenty diary excerpts written between 1830 and 1996, covering the upper-class travails of nineteenth-century travelers and settlers to the workday struggles and triumphs of twentieth-century students, teachers, housewives, and writers. The diarists are single, married, with children and without, and, on at least one occasion, hiding love for another woman. The excerpts - all preceded by a biographical sketch - make compelling reading. Elsie Rogstad Jones details the sudden death of her infant daughter in 1943; Constance Kerr Sissons, writing in 1900, discovers that her husband already has a Métis wife "à la façon du pays"; and Dorothy Duncan MacLennan ruminates on her married life with Hugh MacLennan in 1950s Montreal. Writers Marian Engel, Edna Staebler, and Dorothy Choate Herriman articulate their creative processes. Two diarists, Phoebe McInnes and Sophie Alice Puckette, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, sketch the contradictions and difficulties in the lives of single female teachers. In an excerpt from 1843, Sarah Welch Hill, a newly arrived settler to Canada describes her violent marriage in what must be one of the few documents describing nineteenth-century domestic abuse in the first person. The Small Details of Life represents a significant contribution to the fields of Canadian women's history and life-writing, and enriches our understanding of women's literature in Canada, especially its tradition of non-fiction, personal writing by such women as Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, and Anna Jameson, among others.9 "This anthology presents twenty diary excerpts written between 1830 and 1996, reflecting the upper-class travails of nineteenth-century travellers and settlers as well as the workaday struggles and triumphs of twentieth-century students, teachers, housewives, and writers. The diarists are single, married, with children and without, and range in age from fourteen to ninety years old." "The excerpts - each preceded by a biographical sketch of the diarist - make compelling reading. Elsie Rogstad Jones endures the sudden death of her baby in 1943; Constance Kerr Sissons, writing in 1900, discovers that her husband already has a Metis wife à la facon du pays'; and Dorothy Duncan MacLennan ruminates on her married life with Hugh MacLennan in 1950s Montreal. Writers Marian Engel, Edna Staebler, and Dorothy Choate Herriman contemplate the creative process. Two diarists, Phoebe McInnes and Sophie Alice Puckette, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, reveal the contradictions and difficulties of their lives as unmarried schoolteachers. In an excerpt from a diary written in 1843, Sarah Welch Hill, a newly arrived settler, describes her violent marriage in what must be one of the few nineteenth-century documents describing domestic abuse in the first person." "With an introduction that examines diary writing by women in Canada from a historical and theoretical perspective, The Small Details of Life represents a significant contribution to the fields of Canadian women's history and life-writing. It enriches our understanding of women's literature in Canada, especially the strong tradition of personal non-fiction writing, and provides compelling glimpses into the lives of a range of Canadian women."--Jacket Contents 5 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 15 PART ONE: TURBULENT BEGINNINGS 45 Frances Ramsay Simpson (1812-1853) 45 Diary, British North America, 1830 52 Sarah Welch Hill (1803-1887) 71 Diary, Canada West, 1843-1845 78 Amelia Holder (1855-1936) 107 Diary, New Brunswick, 1868-1869 114 PART TWO: CONFLICT AND CONFUSION 131 Jessie Nagle and Susan Nagle 131 Jessie Melville Nagle Diary, British Columbia, 1869-1870 136 Susan Abercrombie Nagle Diary, British Columbia, 1870 149 Sarah Crease and Susan Crease 163 Diaries, British Columbia, 1878 170 Constance Kerr Sissons 197 Diary, Ontario, 1901-1902 204 PART THREE: HESITATION AND PAUSE 231 Phoebe Mclnnes 231 Diary, British Columbia, 1901 238 Caroline Alice Porter 251 Diary, Saskatchewan, 1907 258 Sophie Alice Puckette 267 Diary, Alberta, 1908 274 PART FOUR: EXPLORATION 291 Mina Wylie 291 Diary, Ontario, 1911 297 Miriam Qreen Ellis 313 Diary, Northwest Territories, 1922 320 Mary Dulhanty 335 Diary, Nova Scotia, 1926-1927 342 PART FIVE: LOVE, LOSS, AND WORK 365 Dorothy Choate Herriman 365 Diary, Ontario, 1932-1933 370 Elsie Rogstad Jones 383 Diary, Alberta, 1943 388 Dorothy Duncan MacLennan 405 Diary, Quebec, 1953 412 Marian Engel 432 Diary, Prince Edward Island, 1976 438 PART SIX: REFLECTIVE ENDINGS 457 Mary Eidse Friesen 457 Diary, Manitoba, 1990 462 Edna Staebler 466 Diary, Ontario, 1996 472 Bibliography 481 Contributors 491 Illustration Credits 497 "With an introduction that examines diary writing by women in Canada from a historical and theoretical perspective, The Small Details of Life represents a significant contribution to the fields of Canadian women's history and life-writing. It enriches our understanding of women's literature in Canada, especially the strong tradition of personal non-fiction writing, and provides compelling glimpses into the lives of a range of Canadian women."--Résumé de l'éditeur