Crossing Canada, 1907: The Diary of Hope Hook ed. by Juliet McMaster, et al. (review)

Diary writing emphasizes its movement through time. By necessity, diary writing meanders through a narrative with an uncertain plot line, iterated in daily snapshots. Diarists don’t know how the story is going to turn out. This is the great quirk and the great hook of diary writing: it can give diaries a sense of momentum. Diary writers are often compelled by the possibility of discovery. However, that sense of movement, of travel, of discovery—whether it be in time or in space—can sometimes seem disconnected from later readers who have the fact of the finished text before them. One of the difficulties about reading diaries then, according to Philippe Lejeune, is that readers are cut off from the original momentum which now seems “complete and immobile.” Lejeune describes the process of reading 19th-century diaries by young girls, for example, and laments that he was “the only one moving in relation to them by discovering them” (321). Editing diaries also often serves to deaden the effect of discovering and reading a manuscript.

When Juliet McMaster and co-editors considered the travel diary of young Hope Hook, written in the early twentieth century, they faced a set of challenges: could readers join diarists in a mutual process of discovery? How should they edit and present manuscript diaries so that their kinetic movement through time and space is recreated on the published page? Is it possible? Is it even more important to retain the sense of movement and discovery in a travel diary? What McMaster and her coeditors managed to achieve in this slim and handsome volume is worth noting for future diary editors hoping to restore the sense of discovery that can animate diary writing and reading.

Juliet McMaster, professor emeritus at the University of Alberta best known for her work on eighteenth-century writers, actually remembers Hope at the end of her life, in her seventies, living on Vancouver Island (xi). When Hope Hook writes her diary, she is fifteen years old and at the start of a life that will take her through two world wars and a depression before ending in 1979 when she is eighty-seven. Her young age at the time of writing is significant. For one thing, Hope’s diary refutes the notion that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century diaries by young girls “are a recreational activity, like stitching or playing the piano: meek, sickly sentimental, and boring” (Lejeune 133). Certainly, Hope keeps her diary as a recreation and a past time, but her intelligence shimmers on each page: she is interested in life, curious about a great number of things, a great relater of anecdotes. Her young age is significant for another reason too. As Perry Nodelman explains in an editorial for the journal Canadian Children’s Literature, too often we examine writing by adults about children and all too rarely examine the kinds of literature “actually written by young people” (12). The publisher of this text, Juvenilia Press, represents a rare outlet where the writings of children and young adults can find publication.

The Hook family archives, the source of this diary, have been the source of other treasures. For example, McMaster published in 2006 the diary of Rosalie Hook, the artist wife of the renowned painter James Clarke Hook. Hope Hook is Rosalie’s granddaughter, and Juliet McMaster herself is the daughter of Hope’s cousin. The connection between the two women is helpfully illustrated in family trees included in both published works, and Hope’s birth is mentioned in her grandmother’s later Silverbeck diaries in a simple entry reading “August 25, Born Hope Hook—” (179). The diary now published as Crossing Canada is written in 1907 when fifteen-year-old Hope undertakes a voyage from the south of England to western Canada, traversing the prairie by train and making it as far as Vancouver Island. McMaster is the first to note that...