The Diary of Sarah Clinch: A Spirited Socialite in Victorian Nova Scotia ed. by Meghan Hallett, and: Love Strong as Death: Lucy Peel's Canadian Journal, 1833–1836 ed. by J.I. Little (review)

456 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 faith. Christianity is not a cultural accomplishment that we might defend for its cultural benefits but a profound existential challenge that begins with the unqualified choice to believe. Mercer is always on top of the text and is a most reliable guide to Kierkegaard=s argument. His book is not, however, very adventuresome. It stays close to the main lines of Kierkegaard=s analysis, and the route it takes through the work is familiar. If one is eager to discover if not a new Kierkegaard then a new approach to various aspects of his thought, one will not find it here. I would also add that while it is important to get Kierkegaard right, and Mercer does, it is also important to ask whether Kierkegaard is right. Would Hegel have come to see the error of his ways had he had the benefit of the Philosophical Fragments? Hardly. He would have seen in Kierkegaard the rejection of reason and modernity and a defence of what I think he would take to be the bad old days of pre-Enlightenment religion, namely individualism, a lack of social and political responsibility, an inability to distinguish faith from superstition, an invitation to put religion into the hands of those caught up with what Spinoza refers to as >despotic statecraft .= In Fragments Kierkegaard fires his slingshot, but it is not altogether clear that he hits the mark. A huge and ponderous Hegel might just deflect the shot with his shield. >Philosophical Fragments, indeed!= he might sneer. Socrates does not so much teach us a doctrine as come alive for us in discussion and dialogue. I think that this is also true of Kierkegaard. The Fragments needs Hegel or Hegel=s position as much as the Gorgias needs Callicles. (R.Z. FRIEDMAN) Meghan Hallett, editor. The Diary of Sarah Clinch: A Spirited Socialite in Victorian Nova Scotia Nimbus. x, 182. $21.95 J.I. Little, editor. Love Strong as Death: Lucy Peel=s Canadian Journal, 1833B1836 Wilfrid Laurier Univeristy Press. x, 230. $39.95 Jacques Derrida speculates about the pleasures of reading personal writings when he describes the unpublished letter as a >repository for Aprivate emotions,@= a confessional form >whose privacy, like virginity, invites violations.= Privacy is understood to signal secrecy and an untold story, preferably a naughty one. Although there is a story to be uncovered in the personal non-fiction writings by men and women of the nineteenth century, it is not salacious or scandalous. It is a story about the difficulties of creating and circulating personal writings in nineteenth-century Canada. It is a story overlooked by the editors of two recent publications of previously unpublished personal writings, although the works themselves offer ample evidence. humanities 457 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Letters, such as those described by Sarah Clinch in her diary of 1853B54 or those written by Lucy Peel in her journal letter of 1833B36, are highly self-referential, articulating the conditions under which they are written and their routes of circulation. Clinch describes, for example, a journal letter addressed from her temporary home in Halifax to her mother in Boston; it consists of >fourteen pages of layer letter paper besides a sheet to father. ... Tomorrow I will make up my bundles as the Belle goes on Monday.= She elsewhere expresses consternation about the fate of another package sent home: >I so hope the parcel is safe. ... It will be so provoking if it is lost after the delay in the first one too.= Shipwrecks were a very real possibility and imperilled one of the only modes of communication between separated family members. When the Belle, which carried epistles between Clinch and her family, sank in April 1854, it is worthy of remark in Clinch=s diary because none of her personal correspondence perishes, although two men do. Writing some twenty years before Clinch is Lucy Peel, who finds the routes of communication narrowed during winter months when ships cannot ply the St Lawrence to reach her home in the Eastern Townships: >We sent off a letter to...