Abstract

Historians are increasingly using diaries in their research to uncover the largely hidden lives of nineteenth-century women. Diaries provide evidence about the internal lives of individual women and allow scholars to speculate on how women actually experienced Victorian cultural expectations and restraints. In her journals, Louise Amelia Monk (1850-1874), the only daughter of the six children born to Judge Samuel Cornwallis Monk and Caroline Debartzch, describes coming of age in bourgeois Montreal. Louise's particular experience of adolescence was shaped by her class, race, gender, religion, and her unique personality and family circumstances. Louise's introspective diary entries, composed between 1867 and 1871, are dominated by faith, family, female education, and friendship and chart her journey of self-awareness. Her writing shows a young religious, Catholic, bilingual Anglophone woman growing up within a loving and intellectually stimulating family who accepted her female destiny (marriage and motherhood) with little ambivalence. Louise employs her diary as a silent confidant, voicing concern about her future, and as a place to express her spirituality. Louise died at 23 years of age, leaving behind a bereaved family and a compelling historical and literary document.