"This anthology presents twenty diary excerpts written between 1830 and 1996, reflecting the upper-class travails of nineteenth-century travellers and settlers as well as the workaday struggles and triumphs of twentieth-century students, teachers, housewives, and writers. The diarists are single, married, with children and without, and range in age from fourteen to ninety years old.".

"The excerpts - each preceded by a biographical sketch of the diarist - make compelling reading. Elsie Rogstad Jones endures the sudden death of her baby in 1943; Constance Kerr Sissons, writing in 1900, discovers that her husband already has a Metis wife à la facon du pays'; and Dorothy Duncan MacLennan ruminates on her married life with Hugh MacLennan in 1950s Montreal. Writers Marian Engel, Edna Staebler, and Dorothy Choate Herriman contemplate the creative process.

Two diarists, Phoebe McInnes and Sophie Alice Puckette, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, reveal the contradictions and difficulties of their lives as unmarried schoolteachers. In an excerpt from a diary written in 1843, Sarah Welch Hill, a newly arrived settler, describes her violent marriage in what must be one of the few nineteenth-century documents describing domestic abuse in the first person.".

"With an introduction that examines diary writing by women in Canada from a historical and theoretical perspective, The Small Details of Life represents a significant contribution to the fields of Canadian women's history and life-writing. It enriches our understanding of women's literature in Canada, especially the strong tradition of personal non-fiction writing, and provides compelling glimpses into the lives of a range of Canadian women."--BOOK JACKET.