‘Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady ,’ by Kate Summerscale

In the 19th century, Kate Summerscale reports, keeping private diaries became all the rage among the educated and genteel of England: “Of all the written life stories that fascinated the Victorians — biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, journals of health and travel and politics — the personal diary was the most subjective and raw, the most revealing of the problems of writing and reading about the self.” The fad “was fueled by the popularity of Romantic poetry, which prized introspection, and by the first publications of personal journals: the seventeenth-century diaries of John Evelyn originally appeared in 1818 and those of [Samuel] Pepys in 1825.”

Diaries were especially popular among women, even the most privileged of whom led sharply constrained lives and were granted virtually no rights. Married women lived at the mercy of their husbands, who had total control over whatever money they brought to their marriages, and single women — especially those old enough to qualify as spinsters — were similarly disenfranchised. Small wonder that many of them turned to diaries as a means of self-expression and exploration of emotions and experiences about which they could not, or would not, speak to others. This was not without its risks: “The act of diary-keeping honoured many of the values of Victorian society — self-reliance, autonomy, the capacity to keep secrets. But if taken too far, these same virtues could turn to vices. Self-reliance could become a radical disconnection from society, its codes and rules and restraints; secrecy could curdle into deceit; self-monitoring into solipsism; and introspection into monomania.”

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(Bloomsbury USA) - ’Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady’ by Kate Summerscale

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For one woman, Isabella Robinson, diary-keeping turned into nothing less than a nightmare. Born in London in 1813 into a prosperous family, she was widowed in 1842 and remarried, to Henry Oliver Robinson, in 1844. She had three sons, one from her first marriage, and was deeply unhappy. In 1849 she began keeping a diary, in which she set down her complaints about her husband — “he was an ‘incongenial partner’ . . . ‘uneducated, narrow-minded, harsh-tempered, selfish, proud’ ” and contemptuous of her longing “to talk about literature and politics, to write poetry, learn languages and read the latest essays on science and philosophy.” As Summerscale notes, the diary was Isabella’s means of escape:

“Isabella, like many nineteenth-century women, used her journal as a place in which to confess her weakness, her sadness and her sins. In its pages she audited her behaviour and her thoughts; she grappled with her errors and tried to plot out a path to virtue. Yet by channeling her strong and unruly feelings into this book, Isabella also created a record and a memory of those feelings. She found herself telling a story, a serial in daily parts, in which she was the wronged and desperate heroine.”

Her diary became a record of the emotional roller coaster ride that was her life. She “had been guilty, she said, of ‘impatience under trials, wandering affections, want of self-denial and resolute persistence in well-doing; as a parent, as a daughter, as a sister, as a wife, as a pupil, as a friend, as a mistress.’ ” Precisely what she meant by this last is unclear — probably she meant as a “mistress” to servants — but elsewhere she made it abundantly plain that one of the causes of her unhappiness was deep sexual desire and frustration: “I long for things I ought not to prize. I find it impossible to love where I ought, or to keep from loving where I ought not. My mind is a chaos, a confused mingling of good and evil. I weary of my very self, yet cannot die.” She was “excitable and depressive, ambitious and anxious.” She was “disturbed by her sexual appetites,” which “had hastened her into two bad marriages and was now snaring her in longing for Edward Lane.”