The Victorian Diary: Authorship and Emotional Labour by Anne-Marie Millim (review)

Approaching the diary not simply as a repository of lived experience or record of “self-examination” (2) but as “a vital tool in rational decision-making” (1), Millim applies the sociological concept of emotional work to argue that certain Victorian authors used their diaries as a site of emotional “self-management” (2), an intentional disciplining or “private socialisation” that helped the diarist “fashion a respectable persona for the public sphere” and redirect their “emotional resources” to “favour and further literary production” (2). The private act of emotional management, Millim argues, “consisted in readying the diarists’ perceptive and evaluative mindset through actively managing the emotions so that emotional labour—the basis of authorship—could occur” (183). In the case of the Victorian diarists she analyzes, this emotional labour produces the novels of George Eliot and George Gissing, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, criticism and nonfiction by John Ruskin and Elizabeth Eastlake, or the diary itself, in the example of Henry Crabb Robinson and Edith Simcox. While Millim suggests that “[a]ll diaristic writing is to some degree aware of a potential audience and therefore outwardly oriented” (9), the public for whom these acts of emotional sculpture are performed is most often represented by the writer himself, who uses will and intellect to reshape strong feeling into useful emotional energy, polices moral conformity to cultural norms, and reinforces personal and cultural standards of literary taste. In their “desire to gain control over the emotions and to exploit them as a productive resource” (4), Millim says, these writers used the diary “not simply [as] a tool for repressive self-control but also an instrument for artistic self-development and public self-construction” (28), engaging in “self-expression and the professionalisation of the self” (25) as a means to “achieve professional productivity and respectability” (1).

The argument is well-grounded in research on the practices of life-writing as well as Victorian attitudes toward emotionality, excitability, and moral approbation of regulated affection, best demonstrated in the writings of Eastlake herself. Readers new to the concepts, however, might be forgiven if they find the distinction between “emotional management” and “emotional labour” occasionally slippery and at times interchangeable. In the diaries of cultural commentator Henry Crabb Robinson and art critic Elizabeth Eastlake, the subjects whose “tailored public performance” (65) forms chapter one, “emotional management[,]. . . fundamentally a private adjustment and position to societal circumstances, is turned into a model for public emulation” (28). The utterances in Eastlake’s highly edited diaries “reinforced cultural norms of propriety” (56), educating her readers in a model of refined womanhood that avoided too-feminine excess of emotion, while, Millim argues, Crabb Robinson’s emotional labour is defined by its absence; he shrank from creative endeavor, insisting he “lacked emotional resourcefulness” (49) and the “sensibility” (53) required to shape literary works. The second chapter engages with the professional anxieties of the novelists Eliot and Gissing, reading their diaries as “an emotional account book” (63) in which both authors “negotiated their personal and authorial value . . . which allowed them to manage their emotional resources and ensure maximal productivity” (67). The “economic reasoning” (81) of their respective diaries shares high expectations of cultural and literary value with Ruskin, the subject of chapter three, whose diaries became a “tool to conduct and document the emotional labour of feeling visual beauty” (109), the task upon which his career as an art critic depended. Ruskin’s personal reflections, like those of Eliot and Gissing, reveal his effort to establish the “emotional receptivity” that escaped Crabb Robinson, by “trying to control ungovernable aspects of the self and to make them function at maximal productivity” (109). The outward orientation of emotional management is most subtle in the last chapter, which examines the ways in which Simcox and Hopkins “used their diaries to construct and execute strategies of resignation, through which they could manage their desires and turn them into productive labour” (147). While the goal of Hopkin’s emotional labour is “to convert undesirable emotions into...