For more than a century and a half women from Prince Edward Island have been writing diaries and documenting their lives as immigrants, shopkeepers, farm wives, teachers, both in the countryside and in the town, as members of a bourgeois élite but more often as ordinary Islanders. Their life writing of their everyday is examined here in its most original form as handwritten documents in diaries, ledgers, scribblers and on tattered pages obtained from archives, biographies and family fonds. Undoubtedly the autobiographic genre was instrumental for Island women in the articulation of their voice but how they sabotaged and shaped this literary form is the main concern of this research. Island women’s redefinition of the genre confirms their participation in what D.M.R. Bentley (1992) refers to as the transition or migration literary genres undergo over time and when transplanted to new locations. Young women have traditionally been encouraged to keep a diary as it did not interfere with the business of being a woman. Oftentimes women continued this preoccupation throughout their lives, leaving documents rich in the details of their everyday. Some of these diaries have survived the culling of attics and were maintained by families or donated to archives. Sandstone Diaries examines 18 unpublished diaries from women who lived in 19th and 20th century Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province located in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River.

The diaries examined here range from a few pages in a shop ledger to volumes of notebooks covering anywhere from a few months to over 90 years of their author’s life. The diarists lived and wrote their way through Canada’s history as a colony of England, witnessed the Confederation of Canada as a nation, became engaged in the Front and pioneered women’s entry into numerous modernist endeavours. However, such milestones in Canada’s history were seldom the gist of these women’s texts, instead they were preoccupied with the weather, their family, friends and community, and through their inscriptions the diarists provide the social and psychological context for such events.

Island women’s representations of themselves in their diaries are examined here with women as they are presented in local histories, folk stories, newspapers and works of art of their time. This intertextual and interdisciplinary study of these Island women’s diaries supports what Janet Wolff (1990) refers to in Feminine Sentences, that by weakening the discipline boundaries new possibilities for reading women’s texts are created. In this research numerous literary and linguistic approaches have been instrumental in exploring both why and how women chose to represent themselves in the autobiographical genre.

The appeal of the journal intime with its form and formlessness gave a space for women to create a discourse that articulated a subjectivity often influenced by the texts women were exposed to such as conduct manuals and the Bible. But as Helen Buss (1993) in Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English explains the diary was a genre that women could exploit for the purpose of writing about experiences unaccounted for in the male-dominated genres of her time. Island women diarists created their own idiosyncratic discursive strategies and thematic techniques to tell the stories of their lives in their diaries. The unpublished nature of the diaries examined here has given direct access to the inscription practices of the author; a sudden change in her handwriting, gaps in her text, her sabotage of a shop ledger to tell about more personal, familial or social events, or her drawings or poems in the margins of her journal are all features eliminated once a diary is published. Here the journal intime in its most original form is studied as an important cultural artefact that reveals women’s representation of themselves and their world not found elsewhere.

These documents were found much like one finds a stone on the beach and examined as one would a sandstone by brushing away the soft formation of rock to expose the composition of the rock. Similarly the unpublished diaries of Island women resemble the soft layered Island sandstone, fragile in appearance and texture yet radiating spectacles of life and lives hidden from history.