Catherine Delafield. Women’s Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6517-5. Price: US$99.95/£55.00

The nineteenth-century debate about the respectability of female authorship often focused on the kind of text produced. A woman’s diary escaped this consideration because it reaffirmed feminine norms, with its domestic concerns and private nature. Yet when a woman’s diary is revealed to others, displaying this private life potentially transgresses feminine proprieties. The diarist’s intentions become suspect when she publicly divulges her private thoughts. Writing with an audience in mind suggests an artfully contrived performance rather than a modest, truthful account of home life. Catherine Delafield’s work adumbrates the evolution of women’s diaries in Victorian narratives, and while other critics have studied fictional diaries that stand alone, relayed through a single voice, Delafield focuses on those embedded in other literary productions, and the ways in which the inclusion of a diary expands narrative possibilities. She enriches her exploration by tracing how gender norms impact the effects of a diary written, or perceived to have been written, by a woman. By exploiting “the ideological position of the woman as narrator,” authors could use the real limitations on Victorian women’s voices to formulate new narrative devices (47). In considering what Delafield terms the “narrative of inclusion,” the readers’ attention is drawn to the physical object of the diary, how a woman produces it and transmits it to readers, and how the diary is shaped by an outer frame negotiated by an editor. Delafield’s observations about these narrative techniques become particularly compelling in her analysis of the serialized fiction within periodicals. This monograph methodically traces the history of publishing women’s diaries, first as real accounts, and then as narratives embedded in works of fiction. Part One explores how the non-fictional diary influences the reading and writing of fictional diaries. While the Romantic valuation of individual experience sanctioned accounts of private lives, nineteenth-century women had a more ambiguous relation to diary writing when gender norms dictated that their highest ambition was to turn attention away from themselves and toward others. Nonetheless, the diary authorizes female self-representation when, addressed to a kind of silent confidante or second self, it simply records family events, household economies, and spiritual life. The writer documents only what she knows at the time of writing without the benefit of retrospection, thus presenting an artlessly conveyed, “unmediated reflection of a life without interpretation” (15). Maintaining this domesticity pitches the diarist’s feminine voice as authentic by downplaying the diarist’s authorship, even when a woman’s diary was read by an intimate circle of family and friends. The second chapter examines the originally unpublished diaries of Frances Burney and Elizabeth Gaskell to show how even a small audience promotes the female diarist’s awareness of her performativity, thus transforming her, however unwillingly, into an author. When a woman’s diary enters the public in print, as nonfiction or fiction, it invites “a more complex negotiation between self and society” (39). The next describes how editing reshapes published diaries to suit readers’ contemporary social norms rather than the author’s. For example, excerpts from Burney’s diary were edited in the 1840s by her niece, who, without diminishing Burney’s worth as a novelist, nonetheless emphasized approved, nineteenth-century feminine qualities: rather than an authoress who enjoyed her fame, Burney emerges as a retiring, dutiful woman who delighted in the domestic realm. The nonfictional diary’s entry in the nineteenth-century marketplace promoted the use of fictional women’s diaries in larger narratives. The increasing demand for women’s literature and women’s real stories expanded the social acceptability of a woman’s private life revealed in print. Using several novels, such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859-60), Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall …