The Diary of Elizabeth Lee

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Had I kept a diary as an adolescent, I like to imagine that it would have had a decently high charm quotient. I suspect, though, that it mostly would have been a series of repeats, in the musical sense: "Fantasized about F- from class. Read Fitzgerald's Winter Dreams' again. Fantasized some more. Hockey practice. I feel grubby." In some iterations, "Winter Dreams" probably would have been replaced by "The Sensible Thing," but I doubt much more would have changed. I don't think there's a rarer literary quality than charm. It's difficult to convey, as it is both clever and unselfconscious. It is something that, if you have it, you're simply lucky to have been born with it; and if you're able to regularly deploy it, you're probably aware of your advantage over just about everyone else. Elizabeth Lee was one such possessor of charm, and it had the effect of removing her, somewhat, from her own family, even as she was bound to them as a Victorian woman. Her diary-which fastidiously documents her life between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five-is a singular document. Victorians loved the word singular more than any people in any other age, it seems, but there's no point downplaying the rarity of a text like this one. It was not uncommon for British girls and women to keep diaries during the Victorian era, as they provided outlets for what history textbooks tell us were repressed feelings and frustrations, symptoms of a period in time when young women served as domestic assistants at their mothers heel. We all love Victorian luridities as we find them in Stoker, Doyle, and Jack the Ripper clippings, but it was a button-down time. If you were a woman, the only adventure you were likely to have that involved a mire or gaslight intrigue would be what you read about in contemporary novels. Elizabeth Lee powered her way through lots of them, about fifty a year. It was a point of some honor for her, a statistical assertion of pride that is sounded several times throughout these pages. As for their singularity: I think most of us look back on our adolescent years with some embarrassment. Had we a record of those days, it's not unlikely that it might have gone the way of the dumpster or the fireplace, once pride and insecurity-the teenager's proprietary blend-gave way to mortification. This record, however, kicked down through the ages, a plucky time capsule that refused to be buried. Not only was Elizabeth Lee inured to insecurity, she was, we learn, much like a lot of her Merseyside peers. Which is to say, not like we might have expected Victorian women to be at all. This was not a girl or a woman unafraid to walk down a rural, unpaved, foggy street, at any hour of the day or night-the very earliest hours of the day if she was returning from a ball. The balls, apparently, could rage on until three in me morning. I've read enough Wilkie Collins to think that I'd not be especially keen to ramble about after a certain hour, but Elizabeth Lee and her friends were relatively fearless. Of course, it could be that they had nothing to fear. Community-and communal trust and neighborly relations-is at me core of the journal, even when Lee herself retreats to her private, closed-off journaling world. Her reasons for wanting to do so differ little then the reasons that a young woman might have today: a house full of boys, and what emerges here as a burgeoning interior life. The date with the young man isn't so much the thing, as the private time spent reliving that moment, and recording it, on the page. I could get on board witl1me kind of life that Lee leads. There is some domestic heavy lifting to tend to-spring cleaning alone was a two-week process-but Lee typically picked and chose her tasks. Some, such as dress-mending and altering, appealed to her creative side, and she worked witl1 girls her own age who were part of me domestic help. The entries are generally comprised of tl1reeor four lines, but occasionally they swell to chunky paragraphs that probably felt like a lot of words to a young woman with no literary pretenses. January 30th, 1890, was one of our Ms. Lee's exciting days, of which she had many, despite her station as a (then) unmarried woman in a middle-class house of boys. Ma came back from L'preston. Had dinner with Mr. Rigg at 6.30.pm at "Bear's Paw"; then went to Opera "Romeo and Juliet" actually sat in 'dress circle'. It was delicious. Wore my blk dress trimmed with pink. Theatre was packed. Such swells. I bet they were. The underscoring is telling, and it's also charming in its way. Other, presumably wealthier patrongs , took sitting-what a privilege-for granted. The newness of me experience must have made Gounod's music sound all the livelier to the young woman. Music bleeds into the prose, and even me shortest journal entries have a singsong quality to them, like this one from a Friday evening: "Baked today. Washed my head." An admirable pairing. Boys turn up quite a bit, and do what boys do-cajole, compete, show-off, and make themselves available for "jolly" walks along the moor, which results in several close calls on the parent front. Detection is generally avoided, which is fortunate for us too, given that such piquancy generally promotes page-turning. The New Criterion