Content area
Full Text
Elizabeth Podnieks. Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart and Anais Nin. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, 2000. 407 pp. ISBN 0-7735-2021-X, $65.00.
The stimulating title of this book introduces its central paradox. Diaries are by definition linear; the disruption of chronological narration is one of the most recognizable characteristics of early Modernism. Elizabeth Podnieks argues persuasively that the techniques of diary-writing, for example dashes and ellipses indicating a fluid stream of thought, resemble those in Joyce's or Woolf's fiction. This leads to the more problematic assertion that the "diary may be considered the quintessential text of modernist fragmentation" (91). The fragmentation referred to is the regular intervention of the date; on this basis, all diaries from any period are Modernist within Podnieks' definition, ,at once fragmentary and unified" (106).
Podnieks focuses on four women writers: Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anais Nin. She argues that the diary as a genre is a fluid form which crosses generic boundaries into autobiography and fiction. Some of her writers appear to create in their diaries a fictitious version of their domestic lives-what they would have liked to happen rather than what actually occurred. Disappointment, neglect, and embarrassment can be transmuted into an idyllic childhood and passionate love affairs in a diary; Podnieks suggests that rewriting the script may provide a kind of therapy and eventually enable self-analysis. The writers' relationships with their diaries are described. It...