Where Narratives Meet: Archival Description, Provenance, and Women's Diaries

Abstract

Women’s diaries have been a rich source of information for historians and other scholars because they contain details of everyday life in different times and places that may otherwise have gone unrecorded. This article addresses the common archival description of diaries and discusses the richer portrayals frequently provided by academics in other disciplines. Aspects of a diary’s provenance that non-archival writers often address but that are rarely mentioned in archival descriptions are the diarist’s motivation for writing, the intended audience, and the implications of the diary’s custodial history and representation. The article concludes with suggestions for improving archival description of diaries and other personal records. In archival description archivists tell stories about stories; they tell stories with stories. —Wendy M. Duff and Verne Harris, “Stories and Names” 1 Diaries are a particularly valuable and intriguing if troublesome genre of personal record. Traditional archival description forms a very narrow basis for understanding these records because of the myriad forms diaries can take and roles they can play in their creators’ lives. An examination of how diaries are described by academics in other disciplines, where they have been the subject of much more extensive theorizing, reveals a number of characteristics that are considered crucial to understanding and interpreting these records, characteristics upon which archivists rarely touch. The diarist’s motivation for writing, the intended audience, the implications of the diary’s custodial history, and the role of the archivist in the diary’s representation all form part of its provenance as it has been reconceptualized by postmodern archival theorists. To illustrate the importance of a fuller understanding of a diary’s provenance, this article refers to three women’s diaries held by the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives (HBCA) and the Archives of Manitoba that were written in very different places and times and differ greatly