Houlbrooke in the volume’s Afterword. Houlbooke surveys Renaissance attitudes and approaches toward suffering to provide a context for the contributions of these various essays toward a better understanding of grief. After drawing several tentative conclusions from this collective study, he sets out a number of questions that deserve further investiga tion before ending with a plea for more cross-disciplinary work between history and literature. The best essays in this volume attest to the benefit of such an approach. Brent Nelson University ofSaskatchewan Kathryn Carter, ed. The Sm all Details o f Life: 20 Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1990. Toronto: UTP, 2002. Fp. 486. With this collection of excerpted diaries by English speaking women in Canada before and after Confederation, Kathryn Carter makes an ambitious contribution to the ongoing project of women’s history in this country. She writes that “the best history is biography and ... reading the details from lives of individual women can do much to broaden and challenge our understanding of Canadian history” (6). Although I do not agree with Carter about the necessary connection between biography and history, which for me still carries with it associations with Georg Misch and the liberal view of history as a record of exemplary individual achievement, I do agree with Carter’s decision to present diary writing as a meeting ground of social conditions and the agency of individual women who wanted to make writing a part of their daily lives. To this end, Carter’s collection brings together selections from twenty diaries by women from the early nineteenth century to 1996, with introductions to the life and times of each diarist provided by various contributors. Carter’s decision to include diaries by women who were unknown alongside diaries by women who are public figures makes the publication of this collection important because much private writing by less-known women in Canada is unpublished and relatively inaccessible. At its strongest, The Small Details ofLife shows that “diary writing matters because it has the potential to trace threads of meaning in the Book Reviews | 283 Kathryn Carter makes an ambitious contribution to the ongoing project of women's history in this country. fragmentation that characterizes human life” (19). In its weaker moments, what Carter sees as a strength—the endless record of minutiae—threatens to overwhelm The Small Details ofLife with too many small details from too many lives. But as Carter points out in her introduction, this elliptical and laconic aspect of diary writing is part of what diary writing is about (9). Editing sections to make them more like a narrative and more “literary” in tone speaks more to the types of things readers want than to the special type of writing that is diary writing, since most diaries are not written with a readership in mind. This makes any reader of The Small Details ofLife an eavesdropper on the writing lives of other people, and so at times it is inevitable that we will be, as Carter says, alienated from the texts and the lives of these writers (9). In her clearly written introduction to the collection, Carter says that diaries are historical documents that exceed the boundaries of social his tory. She wisely avoids typologizing diary as a genre because that would lead her to differentiating between journal writing and diary writing, two types of private writing which she says have similar etymological roots and are difficult to classify in any case. However, Carter’s decision to stress the importance of women’s diaries for the historical record means that she leaves out important scholarship about diary writing in general and diary writing by women in particular which shows how diary writing is one of the discourses of self making (Culley 217-219). Diary writing, for instance, helps to show how private writing by women contributes to our evolving understanding of the growth of self-reflexivity in the west (Nussbaum 128-129). Diary writing by women was also part of complex developments of the public and private spheres before the Victorian period in England (Thompson 6-7), while later it was a way for nineteenth and twentieth century English women to resist social expectations...