Toronto’s Women’s News March 2003. Vol. 6 No. 3
It’s happened to us all at some point -- we spy a diary left on the kitchen table or forgotten in a café. The moral judgment descends. Is it private? Should we read it? Maybe just a few pages? And more importantly, is there anything about us in it?
Few things can pique our curiosity more than highly personal passages written for private audiences. . . except maybe old photographs.
Kathryn Carter, editor of The Small Details of Life: 20 Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996, opens up a secret treasure chest of personal writing discovered in libraries and archives across the country.
Carter, an English Professor at Sir Wilfred Laurier University in Brantford, collaborated with archivists, historians, biographers, academics and in some cases, family members, to painstakingly select and very carefully edit diary excerpts written by Canadian women of varied ages from a wide range of eras, cities and rural townships, classes and professions.
Each diary excerpt is introduced with detailed biographical information and a description of the physical condition of the diarist's writing. There's enough detail of the hand-written leather volumes, pocket notebooks or bound typewritten pages that you can envision cracking open the diary yourself. The text is delightfully dotted with old photographs of the diarists and their families.
What strikes me the most about the collection is how contemporary the issues, problems and ideas the diarists struggled with seem, whether they wrote in the 1890s or 1990s.
Sarah Welch Hill, writing in the 1840s, describes what it's like to emigrate to Canada and live with an abusive husband. Sisters Jessie and Susan Nagle write about the singles scene in Victoria in the 1870s. In 1900 Constance Kerr Sisson finds out her husband cheated on her with his Metis wife. Journalist Miriam Green Ellis writes about a trip to the Northwest Territories in 1922 that helps launch her career.
Some of the diarists are so busy they only find time to scrawl quick notes. Elsie Rogstad Jones writes on July 4, 1943, "Up early again we were busy all day canned peas and beans."
Others write in great detail. Dorothy Duncan Maclennan chronicles her struggle with chronic illness and the complex issues involved in playing a supporting role for her writer husband (Hugh MacLennan) when she is trying to pursue her own career as a painter.
Marian Engel ponders the writing life as she takes a vacation to Charlottetown, getting away from Toronto to map out the beginnings of a new novel.
The title of Carter’s book comes from a poem by Lorna Crozier: "I scratch in my journals/ a mouse rummaging through cupboards. . . chewing the edges of photographs, the small/ details of life. . . everything shrinking/ to the smallest/ thinnest letter/ I."
Collecting and publishing the personal writing of Canadian women is both an important achievement in the study of Canadian history and a significant contribution to Canadian women's literature.
It’s an extremely engaging book that reveals not just the "small details" of Canadian women's lives but also their vitality, energy, wisdom, knowledge, stories and secrets. As we find ourselves reflected so often in these pages, Carter succeeds in answering the questions we all ask: What was it like for other women to live, work and raise families in Canada? How did they feel? What did they think? And were they like me?
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