In 1774, aged sixteen years, Mary Shackelton (Leadbeater) began a lifelong career in Irish women’s self-writing. A ‘great journalist’, she gently boasted, no diary would be ‘so clever’ as hers (2, 46). Rejecting modesty, she congratulated herself on its elegance, comparing it to published models which had been emulated. Yet, her daily jottings and minute transactions were but ‘mere bagatelles’ (2, 57). Her aim was to divert herself, her sister (a rival diarist) and a few female friends in a select and trusted private sphere of shared and comparative reading. She was the most prolific of the forty-one diarists surveyed in this ground-breaking study, which foregrounds the Enlightenment’s capacity to project inner mental and emotional meanderings and self-evaluations. Given the relatively limited scope of most women’s public lives, the assertiveness which emerges from this study belies what we may imagine was achievable. This book opens a compelling window on authorship and female agency, convincingly arguing how these ‘bagatelles’ should be treated as literature. Engaging with previously overlooked manuscript diaries, Amy Prendergast develops a well-structured and robust demonstration of how the diary form allowed women to creatively explore their subjectivity and experiment with projecting the self.
Diarists could preserve their life for posterity or shape a family’s legacy. Some produced and even published in other forms, but journals were vulnerable and were thus often destroyed by others or at the diarist’s behest. In this corpus, women began journalising most commonly and unsurprisingly aged fifteen, though the age ranged from 11 to 67. Adolescents emerged from parental protection and in an often-vivid voice navigated a place in the world, shaping the self. Enjoying the company of friends, they recorded exuberance or sadness at parting. Experiencing mixed-gender sociability and aware that their opinions were devalued, some became sharp and spontaneous observers of discussions on subjects supposedly above their capacity, such as religion, politics, identity or attitudes towards Catholics. The diary became a platform, and teenage girls often constructed their narrative voice by emulating characters from the age’s fiction. Many entered the marriage market and experienced dancing, flirting, courtship and attraction, but also unwanted advances. Offloading fears and unpleasant feelings, some also projected anxiety about what marital duties and procreation would entail. A range of emotional triggers or challenging social contexts also led older women to borrow from their reading, when turning to this private medium to express a widow’s grief and sorrow. Documenting vulnerability and abuse, women also recorded marital, familial and gender violence and excessive drinking.
Scholarly scrutiny of first-person writings has tended to serve Irish history through the conventional lens of high politics, seeking facts or unguarded opinions on decision makers, mindsets and ideologies. The voices have mostly been male, yet despite their restricted social roles, women’s testimonials have been highly valued for their honest immediacy, but mainly as sources on macro-historical events. Prendergast duly addresses the fact that, for example, Leadbeater and Elizabeth Edgeworth left important and immediate insights on the 1798 Rebellion, but confidently focuses on the quotidian and the routine. These perspectives originated within the privileged confines of society, often from within demesne walls, as part of a system perpetuating social divisions. Here was a curated vision of the world, and a significant silence permeates most of the texts on the daily hardships of the underprivileged or the enslaved. Quasi absent are explicit references to landowner-peasant dynamics, poverty, distress or discontent among local populations. Self-identifying as Irish only really occurs when in contrast to foreign others, namely in Bath. This academic exercise engendered a difficult relationship with some of the diarists. Yet, the author felt privileged to read these relatively private accounts of struggles with grief, loss, bereavement, childbearing, mental health, personal autonomy, and even abusive incidents. Grounded in literary theory and allusions to the Gothic, sentimental or picaresque novels which facilitated the verbalising of inner feelings, the book’s illustrations display the materiality of writing and authorial exuberance.
Optimism, sensibility and the ‘means of my doing better’, central to eighteenth-century culture generally, jump off these pages. The much-discussed formal connexion between Protestantism and the drive to self-account, improve and even spiritually introspect is duly addressed in the introduction. Anglicans and Quakers are most represented in the corpus, and the absence of any surviving journals by Catholic women may partially be due to literacy levels: the exception is Eleanor Butler, an aristocrat. Yet, women in France, in a predominantly Catholic culture, were at this time becoming prolific self-examiners and diarists, lifting their voices like their Irish counterparts through literary models and engaging perhaps in a form of enlightened, secularised confession. This paradox makes the lack of Catholic women’s voices from the majority Irish population (e.g. urban and/or middle class) more perplexing. Prendergast links her material to our current age’s recognition of the therapeutic value of journalising, as she encountered innumerable raw instances when diarists referred to their mental health, and how documenting feelings and reactions improved it. Feminist literary historical approaches have broadened the range of text types that we now scrutinise (M. L. Coolahan, ‘The textual terrain: developments and directions in women’s writing, 1500–1700’, in I.H.S., xlvi (2022), 286–300). Moving beyond genres which have been traditionally considered ‘literature’, perspectives gleaned from memoirs, letters and journals considerably broaden our understanding of women’s life experiences, and how they honed literary skills to describe and record them. Our understanding of cultural models for self-assertion, and writing life, can only gain and grow from this fluidly written and highly insightful work.
