In the Interval of the Wave

Prince Edward Island Women's Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing

Mary McDonald-Rissanen

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780773542129
• eBook ISBN: 9780773589261
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Taking its title from a poem by Prince Edward Island poet Anne Compton, In the Interval of the Wave is a close study of diaries written by Prince Edward Island women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Women from both rural and urban regions of the Island recorded their lives in a genre that allowed them to play with the conventions of the language they knew. For busy farm wives, their quotidian language, syntax, and choice of topic appear simple, whereas for the urban elite like Margaret Gray Lord and Wanda Wyatt, the erudition of their diaries suggests a more leisured existence. Mary McDonald-Rissanen argues that the initial reception of the text - its physical appearance, handwriting, gaps, and flood of words - provides interesting insights for understanding the circumstances of Prince Edward Island women from times past. Intertextual readings of the diaries alongside other cultural artifacts such as paintings, histories, folk stories, and songs embellish the idiosyncratic diary discourse. Diaries enabled women to write their voices, create a subjective identity, and redefine their place in the world. In the Interval of the Wave exposes lives lived and recorded in a special moment and place never far from the rhythm of the sea.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: In the Interval of the Wave
• 1 The Tumbled Silence of Stone: Prince Edward Island Women’s Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing
• 2 In Their Long-Belted Dresses: Images of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Prince Edward Island Women
• 3 The Emerging Pioneer Subject: Entrepreneur Emma Chadwick Stretch’s 1856–60 Letters and Ledger
• 4 A Rural Woman’s Perceptions of Home and Beyond: Farm Wife Amy Darby Tanton Andrew’s “A Line a Day,” 1910–1915
• 5 The Modern Professional Woman: Teacher Lucy Bardon Palmer Haslam’s Unpublished Journals (1884–1943)
• 6 Urban Bourgeois Women and Their Everyday: Margaret Gray Lord (1845–1941) and Wanda Lefurgey Wyatt (1895–1998)
• 7 Travelling Women’s Diaries: Mercy Ann Coles (1864), Violet E. Goldsmith (1901), Carrie Holman (1917), Vera Hyde (1929–30) and Lucy Palmer Haslam (1932)
• 8 Now Passion’s Past: Life Writing, Women and Their Times
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index