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M ary’s diaries, over 25,000 words in length, are exactly the type of document that Barbara Maas was referring to in 1990 when she speculated that many female-related historical sources were probably still lying in private hands, their academic value unknown to their owners. As the private journals of an “ordinary woman,” Mary’s relatively brief diaries give us a rich glimpse of Canadian life in the 1850s and 1860s. While most published nineteenth-century life writing by Canadian women was written before 1840 or after 1870, Mary’s writing fills a gap in this genre in the decades around mid-century. Moreover, her diaries are written from the perspective of a middle-class author rather than, as with most published journals, a member of the colonial elite. These valuable documents speak to themes of life writing, family, women’s work, status and class, occupation, faith, social networks and community, and local and national identity for the author and her family.1 Life Writing Diaries have been described as a “personal periodical record” in which an individual, usually on a daily basis, writes about some aspect of her or his life.2 Scholars have generally used the terms “journal” and “diary” interchangeably , and this analysis does the same.3 A diary, which can take a variety of forms, is a type of life writing, a genre that has been defined as consisting of fictional or non-fictional “documents…written out of a life, or…out of a personal experience of the writer.”4 Aside from their value as literary texts, diaries are valuable primary sources for historians.5 In particular , women’s life writing represents a rich field for historical inquiry into private life and an important source for recovering women’s histories.6 15 Introduction part ii ❈ A Diarist’s World The Anglo-American secular diary became a common form of life writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reaching what some have argued to be its height in the Victorian period when private writing became a favourite pastime for many men and women. With roots in the spiritual autobiographies of early modern religious dissenters, and apparently even earlier beginnings in late medieval private prayer books in which owners made diary-like insertions, it is hardly surprising that the content of some women’s diaries from the nineteenth century has a strong religious focus. Many authors wrote about their personal spiritual development and religious activities.7 Conversely, women’s diaries from this period can also record little personal inward reflection, being no more than simple account books. Most women’s diaries tend to exist somewhere between these two extremes.8 In their journals, women from this period tended to focus on other people, but they also filled empty pages with memoranda and miscellanea that included monthly accounts, information on animals, recipes, remedies, lists of social visits received and returned, as well as records of expenditures and daily activities.9 The content of Mary’s diaries is equally diverse. In the back of her later diary she recorded payments made on bills for “dry goods” and “small wheat,” but she also mentioned that she kept a separate account book.10 Otherwise, her writing varies from a descriptive tally of her daily chores to a commentary on the exciting and trying events in her life to a vehicle for her to formalize thoughts, recall memories, and express powerful emotions. It is not a spiritual diary, but it is more than simply lists of information. It served a number of purposes and incorporated different themes. By the late eighteenth century, girls were frequently encouraged to keep a journal and to read their mothers’ diaries, while published journals and advice manuals directed at women helped to shape the genre.11 Women’s diaries were very often semi-public family documents written for the benefit of a future audience, usually the author or her family members . It was not uncommon for diarists to use the personal pronoun “we” instead of “I,” emphasizing the collective family identity as the subject of the narrative.12 In this capacity, women played the roles of family and community historians and were the chroniclers of births, deaths, and marriages.13 Mary may have intended her journal to be a family document . Certainly, she focused her writing on her domestic life and the lives of her family members, but her more personal emotional entries suggest that her writing served purposes other than merely being...

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