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

Think of the nineteenth-century diarist and the words that spring to mind, according to Rebecca Steinitz, are “ubiquitous, woman, secrets, and fiction” (1). The purpose of her study is to contest these preconceived notions and, in effect, to start afresh with what is “essentially a cultural and literary history of the British diary” from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Sigmund Freud—though a postscript gestures briefly toward the bloggers of our own age, creating a similar kind of intimate community (albeit on a much larger scale) to the circulated unpublished journals of the Victorians (4). steinitz divides her book into two main sections: “The Manuscript Diary,” which concentrates on Elizabeth Barrett, Arthur Munby, and the shared family journal; and “The Diary in Print,” which juxtaposes Queen Victoria’s Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands (1868) with The Diary of Samuel Pepys (a Victorian edition of 1880), before switching to the most familiar ground of all diary studies, the Brontës’ embedded fictional journals.

The structure of the book is therefore driven by generic issues rather than by chronology, and discussion of its key texts and authors is cross-cut by reference to the “dailiness” and “yearliness” of diaries, and issues of space and gender (18, 25). It takes some time to understand exactly why the book is ordered this way, or why Barrett looms larger than any other diarist in the first section. Catherine Delafield assigned a similar importance to Fanny Burney in her Women’s Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2009), but Steinitz largely dismisses Burney as irrelevant to her purposes. For Steinitz, Barrett opens up far more useful territory in relation to the problematic burden of diary-keeping, the anxieties it generates, and its exhausting rhetoric of feeling. steinitz is at pains, however, to insist that the nineteenth-century diary, so often gendered as female, must be considered equally as a masculine domain. As Munby takes over from Barrett as lead example, steinitz reminds us of the centrality of the male-authored private diary in nineteenth-century culture (one only has to think of W. E. Gladstone), and reclaims Munby as a chronicler of dailiness, rather than a sexual adventurer best remembered for his prurient observation of Hannah Cullwick. From Munby we move to travel journals, and the Victorians’ need to record the most banal of tourist sites in order to assert individual authority. The materiality of diaries is also addressed, from loose sheets of paper to the Letts’ Filofax Group’s specialized products for clergymen, physicians, and bankers. Steinitz’s patience with all kinds of diary-writing, from the utterly mundane to the tirelessly passionate, is exemplary, but one is never quite sure where the discussion will go next.

One of the most satisfying subsections is that on “Family, Gender, and the Intimate Diary.” This is where Steinitz claims most strongly that while the content of male- and female-authored manuscript diaries inevitably differs, the form itself is not “inherently gendered or classed” (106). She thus further challenges the (by now) rather battered, but not quite discredited, notion of separate spheres. The distinction Steinitz draws between the manuscript and the printed journal is crucial to her whole argument. She concludes that the manuscript diary was a freer space which “undermined conventional gender dichotomies, while published diaries generated persistent anxieties about gender compliance” (155). Parting company with Delafield, who claims that fictional women’s diaries were influenced by the non-fictional women’s diary, Steinitz argues that fiction itself, especially that of the Brontës, actively helped to produce and promote that model, edging out the male take on domesticity. By the time we reach Wuthering Heights (1847), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), and Shirley (1849), the feminization of the journal is apparently unstoppable.

Critics have generally found it difficult to defend the clumsy use of long-winded diaries in novels such...