Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary [Hardcover]

Through close examinations of diaries, diary publication, and diaries in fiction, this book explores how the diary's construction of time and space made it an invaluable and effective vehicle for the dominant discourses of the period; it also explains how the genre evolved into the feminine, emotive, private form we continue to privilege today.PART I: THE MANUSCRIPT DIARY Elizabeth Barrett, the Abandoned Diary, and the Challenge of Time Arthur Munby, the Endless Diary, and the Promise of Space Family, Gender, and the Intimate Diary PART II: THE DIARY IN PRINT The Politics of Publication Fiction and the Feminization of the Diary

In this well-researched and cogently organized book, Steinitz gives us nineteenth-century diaries in manuscript and print, fact and fiction. Actual diaries were often shared among intimates, kept with equal assiduity by men and women, and invested in both introspection and external observation. Fiction feminized the diary, depicting it as a private repository of feeling that could then become a narrative device for disclosing secrets. Filled with excellent insights about an impressive range of materials, this is the most comprehensive study of the British nineteenth-century diary to date. - Sharon Marcus, Orlando Harriman Professor, Columbia University and author of Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England

Steinitz s study of the nineteenth-century British diary, and of the widely varied uses to which diarists, novelists, and cultural panjandrums put the genre, is impressively panoptic and tightly focused all at once. You ll be struck by how many diarists Steinitz manages to zoom in on, and instructed by how much sense she makes of them, revealing, among much else, that the form s powers as a cultural practice often doomed its practitioners to a sense of failure; that its operations over space as well as time rendered it indispensable both as a figure for expanding empire, and as a hedgel³&