Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary by Rebecca Steinitz (review)

In scope and depth, Rebecca Steinitz deftly accomplishes her intention to provide “a cultural and literary history of the British diary in the nineteenth century, an endeavor that sheds light not only on the diary, but on the workings of nineteenth-century British culture and literature” (p. 4). Recent scholarship has focused on the diary as a woman’s genre but Steinitz opens up the field by taking “gender as an object of inquiry rather than a given” (p. 6). Moreover, by exploring key distinctions between diaries in manuscript and those in print, she highlights specific practices of writing, sharing, editing, and publishing diaries that in turn break down twenty-first-century assumptions about how the so-called separate spheres operated within the Victorian family unit. Certain well-known diarists receive extended attention (primarily Elizabeth Barrett, Arthur Munby, Samuel Pepys, and Queen Victoria), but as they reappear in the course of the study, they speak in dialogue with lesser-known ones (Emily Shore and Charlotte Bury, for example). Finally, by revisiting novels by Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Brontë (as well as those by Wilkie Collins) that contain fictional diaries largely glossed over by critics, Steinitz once again problematizes the process of feminizing the diary.

Entitled “Elizabeth Barrett, the Abandoned Diary, and the Challenge of Time,” chapter one utilizes the example of Barrett’s short-lived and little-known 1831 diary (first published in 1969) as the occasion to explore the multiple and conflicted demands of diurnal diary-keeping, the impossible challenge (as Barrett sees it) of representing “all my thoughts—the thoughts of my heart as well as my head” (qtd. in Steinitz, p. 13). Steinitz argues that this “totalizing representation” constituted “an implicit goal across nineteenth-century British culture,” demonstrating how the diary initially served as an apt vehicle for religious agendas of self-improvement as well as for celebrating the general Romantic pursuit of interiority (p. 37). Nonetheless, just as the practical and theoretical expectations of the genre put such a strain on individual diarists like Barrett that she abandoned her diary, religious and Romantic projects consonant with the aspirations of the diary mode experienced a sense of inadequacy or even failure when they could not sustain their spiritual or ideological resolve.

If Barrett could not maintain her diary for even a single year, other Victorian diarists seemed unable to stop producing volume after volume of diaries over the course of their lives. Arthur Munby serves as Steinitz’s case in point; to his sixty-four manuscript volumes she adds another thirty-one devoted to his chronicling the life of Hannah Cullwick, whose working-class existence enthralled him, as well as twelve more travel notebooks. Due to the prurient nature of Munby’s relationship with Cullwick—increasingly infamous since the publication of his photographs of her in various class-marked styles of dress and undress—the diaries have been read largely for their content rather than through the lens of their implied rationale for habit-forming behavior and what that in turn tells us about the metaphorical and literal spatial functions of the diary. Spatial considerations allow Steinitz to expand her territory to query how observation and memory inform each other, how the travel journal betrays endorsement of empire, and how record keeping supports the materiality of the manuscript book. In this last respect, Steinitz reproduces an 1856 advertisement for Letts’s diaries, which speaks to the universality of diary-keeping while concurrently circumscribing social classifications.

These first two chapters prepare for the third, “Family, Gender, and the Intimate Diary,” which enters the domestic arena and shows how diary protocol broke down and variously realigned gender roles. Steinitz chiefly demonstrates that “diaries help to reveal the investment of men in the intimate realms of the domestic and the family,” ultimately concluding that “while the nineteenth-century British diary does reveal, through its content, the ways gender and class shaped the lives...