When the Personal is Historical

Abstract

When the Personal is Historical Hannah M. Lane (bio) WHETHER CORRESPONDENCE, LIFE WRITINGS, or other personal records, first-person sources have long been a staple for scholars from biographers to historians of cultural production and social practices in particular places. The two books reviewed here–Ruth Compton Brouwer’s All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia and Michael Boudreau and Bonnie Huskins’s Just the Usual Work: The Social Worlds of Ida Martin, Working-Class Diarist1–share a number of common themes with key works in Atlantic Canadian history that primarily use private records. But these two books are distinctive in that they focus on a family during more than one generation and, in Brouwer’s case, during more than one century.2 Many studies based on correspondence and life writings have focused on individuals, key moments, or particular themes. In Atlantic Canada, seafarers and their families3 along with those engaged in other specialized occupations such as medicine4 created life writings shaped by particular kinds of work. Loyalist5 and European settlers wrote about migration experiences shaped [End Page 147] by contemporary forces and events.6 The centenary of the First World War has drawn greater attention to first-person sources from soldiers, military nurses, and families on the home front, inspiring new studies as well as contextualized editions of war diaries such as those published by Island Studies Press or in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.7 Studies of outmigration from the region, a subtheme for some family members in All Things in Common, also rely on first-person sources, whether family correspondence or personal recollections.8 In many life writings from Atlantic Canada, work, family, and local community9 combine with broader themes from the history of childhood and the life course10 or even [End Page 148] environmental history.11 And some life writings fuse work and introspection, such as diaries kept by clergy.12 Scholars have often found the cultural practices of writing and preserving diaries in individuals inf luenced by those strands of Anglo-American Protestantism that emphasized the importance of literacy, self-reflection, and the keeping of spiritual histories.13 As Presbyterians or Baptists, the subjects of the two books reviewed here also fit partly within this tradition. Another significant subcategory within the genre of religious life writings are the earliest published life writings of Black people.14 Yet Indigenous peoples, Acadians, and Black people are underrepresented in life writings from earlier centuries.15 Manuscript recollections, published memoirs, and gathered oral [End Page 149] histories are more available from a broader range of social groups for 20th century biographies16 and other studies.17 In earlier centuries, most of these kinds of life writings were produced by men, and men’s diaries combining intellectually or religiously informed reflection with records of economic activities have generated important studies for 18th and 19th century Nova Scotia.18 By the 19th century, “the golden age of the-then largely secular-private diary,” rural women and middle-class urban women writers were more prominent among the producers of first-person sources,19 as these women were more likely to have literacy, more flexibility in their work, and, for many, also more leisure. This is evident in studies of women’s first-person sources in Atlantic Canada from the early influential work of Margaret Conrad20 to the more recent work of Gail Campbell.21 Both have shown, as do Boudreau and Huskins, how even the busiest women with the “usual work” might respond to a cultural expectation of writing and [End Page 150] keeping correspondence or diaries over time, and how they might find some solace in this. Mary McDonald-Rissanen’s study of Prince Edward Island women’s life writing includes the author’s grandmother,22 and, like the two books reviewed here, are examples of a newer type of historical writing: academic monographs built from their authors’ own families, personal papers, and oral histories. Working within language and literature departments, authors such as Helen Buss or Joanne Findon23 have, not surprisingly, taken more narrative, literary approaches that focus on individuals from their family histories and a few...