Sept. 20, 1989—Hunting through a stack of Victorian nature journals, I pick up a fragile blue-green covered volume entitled the Journal of Emily Shore. What immediately strikes me are the white spaces of the title page. None of the standard puffing of Victorian journals here. Nothing to indicate whether Emily Shore represents a real woman or a pseudonym. No mention of any editor. Even more intriguing is the date. The journal is published in 1891, yet I see that Emily Shore died in 1839, at the age of nineteen. What, I wonder, is the reason for a time lag of over fifty years between the writing and the publishing? And who saw to the publishing of this journal? And why in the 1890s? I feel intrusive as I enter the book’s covers and discover not just the nature diary I had expected but the intense and wide-ranging world of an extraordinary young woman who seems to have lived life fiercely, knowing it would be brief. Unable to put down this record of her life, I acknowledge the shrewdness of the Emily Shore who at age fourteen can tell her unknown reader: “If we are going to read a book, how much impression the name of the author makes on us! And yet it ought to make no difference” (132). How well this applies to her own surprising work.
Sept. 21—Shore’s identity is established. The Dictionary of National Biography lists Margaret Emily Shore (1819–39) as the deceased elder sister of Louisa Shore (1824–95), a “poetess and miscellaneous writer,” and notes that a selection from Margaret Emily’s “Journal” was “published by her sisters in 1891” (151). A third sister, Arabella, a poet, critic, and translator, seems often to have been Louisa’s coauthor and to have survived both Louisa and Emily. She must then have been sole editor of the second edition of [viii] Shore’s journal, which was printed in 1898. So here is a mystery lost and a whole family of literary ladies found—with the two survivors “early and enthusiastic advocates of the cause of women,” according to the DNB.
Sept. 25—Putting aside preconceptions, I decide to meet Emily Shore on her own terms. Shore’s Journal unfolds as the record of a remarkable young life—a book of days about study and books, natural history and family, politics and world events, a girl’s coming of age and a young woman’s struggle against death. Yet what is here is only a fraction of what was written. The introduction says there were once twelve octavo volumes of about 160 pages each; that makes 1,920 pages, and we have just over 350. Where, I wonder, are the rest? I begin to feel that this unique Journal should be reissued, probably reedited, for the centenary of its first publication. There were also Shore drawings “even more precocious than her writings” (xii). How instructive it would be to find the entire cache of Shore papers, with Emily Shore’s histories of the Jews and Greeks and Romans, and her epics, three novels and three books of poems, to say nothing of the “Brief Diaries” that ran concurrently with the journal but reflect a more private world. If the Shore sisters took care to preserve the journal for over half a century, they must surely have willed their papers to some relative or repository.
Oct. 31, Halloween—A university press would like to reprint Shore’s Journal, possibly including previously unpublished sections, but the original remains elusive. Here then is a new mystery: where can I find that original? My check of the publishers’ records of Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner & Co. shows only ledgers of sales and payments to Arabella Shore. The Bedfordshire Record Office, listed in John Batts’s British Manuscript Diaries of the Nineteenth Century as holding the twelve volumes of Shore’s diary, actually holds no more than a typed extract from the journal I have already seen—or so they assure me over the long-distance telephone.
Dec. 22—More discouraging news about Shore’s manuscripts. A correspondent for the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts’ [ix] National Register of Archives writes that the register “includes no reference to Miss Shore’s journal other than that in Batts’s British Diaries.” I S.O.S. a friend in London for help, and she promises to “trot down” to Somerset House and check the Shores’ wills.
Jan. 11, 1990—My jubilant friend writes, “Arabella Shore died 9 Jan. 1901 and left a will dated 5 Aug. 1899 with a codicil including these welcome words, ‘I bequeath the manuscripts and drawings of my sisters Emily and Louisa Shore to the Trustees of the British Museum to be preserved in the department of manuscripts.’” In six or seven months I will be in London to actually touch and see those manuscripts and drawings for myself. I sit down and write a letter of relief and hearty thanks.
June 26—Newly in London at long last, I collect a waiting letter from David Sutton of the Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters. Responding—long since—to a December letter of mine, he too has been stumped by the lack of records of Shore’s manuscript material. But now, kindled to an excited anticipation in the new light of the will, I am off to the British Library, hoping to inspect that very manuscript material.
July 14—The British Library thinks I have made some mistake. They simply have no reference to Shore manuscripts. After two weeks of daily visits, trying the nerves of three separate librarians, I am inclined to agree: there is indeed a mistake—somewhere.
July 15—A legal friend sends me to Somerset House to find out whether the will was probated and who was the lawyer. Crossing a line of people waiting for entry into the new Courtauld Gallery, I enter the Dickensian setting of the hall of death records. Clerks bustle about, an old man with tears in his eyes checks a list two columns long against several large books, and other people sit at small tables poring over wills mounted and preserved in even larger books that nearly fill the tables. I am told to look up my Shore in the 1901 record book of wills and to request seeing the [x] will. Half an hour later I hear what sounds like the word “Shaw” called out several times. I wake up to the realization that my American ear has misheard “Shore,” claim my will, and soon see that on “the 22nd day of March 1901” both Arabella Shore’s will and its two codicils were probated and granted to “Charles Russell Shore the sole Executor.” Later in the day I find that W. Whitfield of Surrey Street, Strand, the legal firm listed, is long dissolved. Desperate, I search through the London phone book, which yields no Shores with the name Charles or Russell or any of the other Shore names I have come to know. In a last-ditch effort to find my manuscript, I will write all of the Shores in the London phone book for help.
July 25—The British Library finally agrees to check all bequests and correspondence from 1900 to 1910 to find a possible Shore bequest. It will be another three-week delay. Meanwhile, they remind me, I can search the records of the Natural History branch.
Aug. 3—On this hot, hot, near 100 degree day, my search for the Shore manuscripts dead-ends, along with most of the rest of busy life in London. Overheated animals in the London Zoo get hosed down, and the curator of manuscripts at the British Library writes that “departmental records for the period 1901–1913 contain no trace of a Shore bequest.” The letter goes on “many bequests and donations were declined with thanks in this period, but these refusals were documented. It is possible that Arabella Shore’s executors did not discharge their obligations.” If true, how thoughtless of them.
Aug. 25—Back in the United States, letters from the Shores in London have accumulated in my absence. I am told by one kind and obliging Shore of his family business history—the cotton trade; I find that there are Shores from as far afield as Canada, Israel, Russia, and Poland; and I have even been asked as a return favor to keep an eye out for a man from Milwaukee who subsequently emigrated to South Africa. But there is no sign of Arabella Shore’s [xi] relatives. I shall have to press on without them or the manuscripts and introduce a printed text.
Sept. 7—Brainstorming about introducing the Journal of Emily Shore raises questions upon questions. To begin with, the editing. Since there is no finding the manuscripts, I must work with the 1890s editions of an 1830s journal. Who, then, is the author of these 351-page condensations? Arabella Shore, whose name is on the publisher’s records? Or both she and Louisa Shore, who died in 1895 and so may have had a hand in the 1891 editing? As they unfold, the original introductions alternate between “I” and “we.” Whichever sister was editor, she certainly parleys with the journal, sometimes intrusively within the text. This editorial voice cannot be ignored.
Sept. 8—Another problem: the Shores are like the Brontës—writing sisters with a family history that is haunted by consumption and early death. It might be satisfying to let their journal reappear without featuring their story and its parallels, and an exceptional work might then quietly drift into the literary canon on its own merits. But do Victorian women still need to enter the literary canon by first being canonized as saints, like Charlotte Brontë in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë? Or as subtle, lonely outwitters of the patriarchy, like Barrett Browning, or Christina Rossetti, who enter through stories of stifling lives overcome or endured? One could easily depict young Emily Shore as a shorter-lived contemporary of Emily Brontë, with parallel commitments to nature and imagination, or as a forerunner of the scholarly prodigy Elizabeth Barrett. Would readers then lose the Shore text in the shadow of the life? Judging from the past, it is clear that canonized personae have clouded the word in women’s texts. Uncanonized, perhaps this young woman could help shift literary history.
Sept. 10—I also wonder whether Emily Shore, self-conscious and self-aware, lived the life she wrote. Does a journal like hers represent [xii] a life or does it construct one? Leaving questions of canonization aside, I am not certain whether one can or should try to escape the obvious pitfalls of biographical criticism. Readers, even contemporary readers, do like life stories—true or false ones—and do like to believe they are true.
They also like to think that an individual’s life—especially in its mundane aspects—represents those of its time and its gender. The Shores’ composite book is a representation of one woman’s days, yet the voices here are full of authority about far more than the day-to-day. The Shores are telling the story of a special woman; their selectivity shows this. How then do these voices join with those of other Victorian women? Can I go on to generalize from the Shores? My historical sense thinks not.
Sept. 20—Some of the references in Shore’s journal are obscure. But if I annotate this text, my annotations will then place emphasis on Emily Shore’s world rather than on her represented self. This troubles me because I would like her or the dialogue with her 1890s editor(s) to have center stage. One thing I will not do is to override or extend the Shore sisters’ bottom-of-the-page annotations.
Oct. 31—For over a month I have been immersed in Arabella and Louisa Shores’ essays and introductions and Emily Shore’s journal. From what they tell us about themselves and each other, the Shores emerge as a remarkable family. The mother, Margaret, was a nature lover and walker; the father, Thomas, an author and teacher who declined preferment in the church because his unorthodox views on religion would not permit him to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, doctrinal statements of the Church of England. Instead, he took in pupils to support his family of five children. Thomas also taught his eldest, Margaret Emily, and she in turn taught her younger siblings—how and what she tells us in her journal. From the pages of that journal Thomas emerges as a gentle and principled man, a view seconded by Arabella Shore in her memoir of Louisa, where their father is described as a person “of high cultivation and singular moral worth; the subordination of [xiii] private interests to considerations of conscience was the habit of his life” (4). All three Shore sisters got guidance from this father, whom Emily represents as encouraging her interests in everything from silk to the cruelty of fox hunting to devotional literature; and all three emerged from his tuition as authors and as questioners of authority. Arabella, next in age to Emily, wrote a Dante for Beginners (Chapman and Hall, 1886) and worked with Louisa on at least four volumes of poems in addition to editing Louisa’s Poems in 1896, after Louisa’s death, and the Journal of Emily Shore in 1891 and 1898. And as early as 1874, Louisa wrote an influential essay on the emancipation of women for the Westminster Review. According to Arabella, this piece was later reprinted as a pamphlet, The Citizenship of Women Socially Considered.
Nov. 5—I decide that the “citizenship” of women seems not to have been a problem for the young Shore sisters. From the very beginning of her journal, Emily Shore assumes a tone of authority usually associated with the male voice. If, as Julia Kristeva says, the woman writing her life must raise self to “the stature of her father” (28), Shore does this with relative ease. The always helpful, liberal father—himself something of an outsider—appears to have encouraged an intellectual rigor in his willing eldest daughter, a rigor that can be misread by the uninitiated reader of the Journal.
I look for critical readings of Shore but find only a tiny handful and note that, to a man, Shore’s male critics have been troubled by Shore’s authoritative, learned persona. In his 1927 collection More English Diaries, Arthur Ponsonby describes Shore’s as the “diary of an infant prodigy whose extraordinary capacity for absorbing knowledge charged her with an abnormal amount of erudition” (204). Abnormal for whom? Not for Shore, but for some nonexistent, generic, young nineteenth-century woman, I suspect. The hyperbolic Ponsonby goes on to decide that Shore’s work “presents an almost ludicrous contrast to a social diary kept by young ladies of her age” (204). A social diary was obviously what Ponsonby had expected to find between the blue-green covers. Some twenty years later, and in contrast to Ponsonby, James Aitken introduced [xiv] a selection from the Journal by simply denying the intellectual Shore voice. To his mind, the journal “is the record of a unique girl, simple, unaffected, affectionate, marvellously gifted, lovable” (139). The trouble is, many of Aitken’s selections belie his judgments—from Shore’s mention of her cutting anti–Reform Bill verses quoted at the beginning of his text, to her tongue-in-cheek observations at being seen as one of a “glorious phalanx of ladies” at its end.
Far from being simple and unaffected, Shore speaks with one or another kind of appropriate authority throughout her journal. I try to define Shore’s voices of authority for myself. Emily Shore is a tough critic of the arts and politics, a keen and experienced observer of nature, and a young woman who knows what she is about as she creates her own personae. She fittingly holds authority over the ins, outs, ups, and downs of a young girl’s life. She does inscribe the woman’s days as a projective male reader might expect her to, but she does much more as well, particularly in the earlier sections of the text. What this all comes down to is that Shore speaks in several authoritative tongues. She critiques the intellectual world in tones that may seem manly for her time and place, but she also speaks with a woman’s voice and, most importantly, with an artist’s. By relying on sexual stereotypes, Ponsonby and Aitken miss Shore’s polyphony.
Nov. 8—I am beginning to see that Shore’s critiques of the artist’s world are her most extensive and have to do with her own learning process. But then so does the entire journal. Had Shore lived, we might have thought of this book as her “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.” From the journal’s beginning, Shore is weeding out bad art from good. As early as page three, she faults Sir Thomas Thornhill’s paintings for St. Paul’s dome as “very ill done” (3). Shore herself drew from a very young age; her sisters’ introduction says she did a drawing of the armory at Warwick Castle “from memory, five weeks after seeing it, at six years and a half old!” (xii). I am coming to believe that all of her short life, Shore looked—and did nearly everything else—primarily in order to learn. In 1834 she saw some pencil drawings, done in very few strokes, that would revolutionize [xv] her own artwork. On December 10 of that year, she decided “it is this style of drawing at which I aim, and I shall neglect shading almost entirely, for I see that in clever hands it is quite unnecessary in producing effect. I cannot bear what the Quarterly Journal of Education calls the neat sampler-like style, practised by so many ladies” (87). Here, then, is Shore’s voice of authority over her own destiny. She does not wish to deny being a lady or to deny the style practiced by other ladies. She simply wants to aim at something else, and aim she does.
With even more evident intensity than she views drawing, Shore reads and criticizes literature. She likes Sir Walter Scott, but not his essays on the Ten Commandments nor the last part of Ivanhoe. Her own closure would have been different; “the book should have finished when Rebecca leaves the room” (172), she tells us. And Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Katherine, and Wolsey are, she feels, “not half so vigorously drawn as I had expected, or as I could, methinks, have done myself” (173). I warm to Shore’s archaic “methinks,” a word that lends enough humor to her criticism to keep it from pomposity. Here she reads as the apprentice writer she certainly was.
Thinking about Shore’s apprenticeships and her range of authoritative personae, I realize that her conscious use of reading to inform her own writing extended to her work in natural history. In 1835 she copied into her journal six months of brief notes observing the onset of spring, “in imitation of [notes] in the Penny Magazine” (106–7). Three years later, she published her bird observations in that magazine. In this case, her Journal provides both a record of her apprenticeship and an instance of the apprentice at work. Shore validates her scientific self by showing its evolution. So this journal is a writer’s life in process; Shore’s words construct a self as it constructs itself.
Nov. 13—I wonder about the other Margaret Shore, Margaret Emily’s mother. Shore’s love of natural history possibly got its impetus from this other nature lover. I think too of Annis Pratt’s concept of a “green world”—the margin to one side of civilization where women’s imprisoned energies can be released, the innocent [xvi] place of preenclosure where the preadolescent girl can possess “herself” (17). Shore certainly lived in and wrote about a green world, but her sisters’ introduction claims that in the world of “Nature,” Emily Shore was “her own sole teacher” (vi). Here again Shore seems self-authorized, if validated by homelife at Woodbury. The journal itself does not show Margaret imprinting Emily with a love of nature. Emily’s dropping of her mother’s name, Margaret, for the title of her journal (if she in fact did title it) suggests a desire for independence from the maternal. And even if her mother did teach her, Shore prefers to image herself as the teacher of her young brother Mackworth, whose boyish delight in snakes and owls thrills his oldest sister. Like Wordsworth’s younger sister Dorothy, Shore’s brother Mackworth mirrors Emily Shore’s developing self. It looks as though the Shore sisters were right, and Shore, again like Wordsworth, “let Nature be her teacher.” The Journal would lead me to think so: “I believe,” says Shore the naturalist, “that if I were chained for life to Woodbury, and never allowed to ramble from it more than three or four miles … I should for ever be discovering something new” (92). Woodbury, not the home but the place, was her own “green world,” a place she observed with scientific scrutiny, noting that “in the study of natural history it is particularly important not to come too hastily to conclusions, but to study facts from observation frequently and most carefully before any inference is drawn from them” (119). She goes on to say that even though she carefully follows her own advice, “still it is provoking to find myself often making blunders from want of observing with sufficient carefulness at first” (119). Greenness for Shore was not a retreat into romance, or even romanticism, but another area for concentrated learning—a place to watch mason-wasp behavior for two hours straight and to record that behavior every few minutes in what suggests a verbal, slow-motion videotape of the animal (111). Emily Shore was without doubt at work to claim the authority of the painstaking observer.
Nov. 17—When I turn from Shore’s quest for learning and the authority of her voice to the art of the journal according to Emily [xvii] Shore, learning becomes central yet again. On April 30, 1836, Shore ended the fifth volume of her journal with a vow to continue journal writing for the rest of her life. Her reason: “the use of the pen is amongst the most valuable means of improving the mind” (138). Ever the learner, Shore was already expert in structuring a journal, and this April 30 entry shows one of Shore’s deftest devices for noting time. Shore picked key dates—the end of a journal volume; her birthday on December 25; “one year ago”; “three years ago”—to give structure to her written life. In that authored life, I find the birthday heroine is one of the most interesting characters and the one who most noticeably alters from entry to entry. In 1832 the narrating Shore shows the narrated Shore as the excited recipient of Babbage’s Economy of Manufactures and marks the day simply by saying, “This is my birthday. I am thirteen years old” (28). By her sixteenth birthday, her entry becomes an occasion to look back, check her vivid memory of her fifth and eleventh birthdays, muse about the swiftness of passing time, and reconfirm how busily employed Emily Shore has always been. To mark age seventeen, the entry alters to a meditation on her onetime happiness and current illness and an announcement of self-hatred over her slow spiritual development. This is followed at eighteen by a short notation only to confirm the closeness of death and the brevity of life. Shore’s final birthday entry, in Madeira, turns away from self after a quick look at the unlikeliness of another birthday, and shifts to a description of the fruit market in Funchal. Is the outer world brought in here to block out inner pain?
From the birthday entries, I would like to generalize about Shore’s life and counter Robert Fothergill, who claims we cannot really find development in diaries because they are concerned with particulars—but the sisters Shore raise their arms and put a stop to me. Emily Shore’s final entry has been edited—pierced with four tiny dots … stop signs between the self and the fruit market in Funchal! I look back to see that others of the birthdays have been deleted altogether. Brought up short, I remember again that this is a doubly edited text—first chosen and arranged by Emily Shore, recollecting her days, and then by her sisters, reviewing and controlling [xviii] those days. The sisters were orchestrating a memoir; Emily was unfolding a life. Even the plots could differ. Certainly Arabella and Louisa Shore ultimately control time in this journal. I remember now that on the fourth page they inserted a passage “to remind us that it is but a child who writes.” They could make their big sister Emily as old or as young as they liked. Selectivity was always their option.
Nov. 18—Sidetracked now by the sisters’ editing, I return to that vexed issue that troubled me in September: Who is author of this book? Now I reassure myself that it is not a sidetrack. In a sense, this is a book by three sisters, consisting of Shore’s representation of her life and Arabella and Louisa Shores’ presentation of that text. Different temperaments, more than fifty intervening years of differing acculturation—these things really matter. At the beginning of chapter ten—and the chaptering, too, must be the surviving Shores’ work, since Emily marked off her larger divisions by volume—the editors pause, like novelists, to summarize. They tell us that from around age seventeen the text cannot give us the whole picture. Emily became sadder and wiser as she grew from the student and observer to the young woman. Both piety and “passionate friendships” (177), they declare, altered her. It sounds as though she developed a crush; but Arabella and Louisa resort to hinting here and reveal that only their mother knew something of its nature. They cover themselves by saying that in any case Emily’s parents were her first and real loves. I am sure that this is where their need to control the text shows the most. They turn the plot from its concentration on learning to the young girl’s adolescent interests—the more conventional social diary that Ponsonby was looking for in Shore’s narrative. Toward the beginning of Emily’s own first entry in chapter ten, their control is still very evident. Here the capitalized “ED.” feels obliged to reinforce Emily Shore’s taste by agreeing with her literary assessments (179). They are given a stamp of approval. Is this the patronizing result that can follow the piety-and-passion character summary that readers have just been offered? I begin to find the younger sisters Shore too invasive.
[xix] Looking at the remainder of the text, I notice how strongly this vein continues. The progress of Shore’s illness, so well documented in the text, is supplemented with a countertext determining exactly when Shore caught the cold that led to her death (196). The mysteries of Shore’s adolescent love are again alluded to in an aside (206–7), along with a “passionate love for Mary W.” and further innuendoes about the return of an unnamed friend are inserted to compensate for six months of the journal that are deleted. The omission, we are told, was made because the descriptions of the reunion were “so mixed up with morbid depression from the poor journalist’s own sinking health” (266). Dear editorial ladies, you go too far. Are you bowdlerizing or just playing coy? I think maybe you are helping create what Sidonie Smith calls the “good woman fiction” of women’s autobiography, suppressing “female eroticism, though not, of course self-effacing love and devotion” (55).
In the end, the sister editors parley with the text. As Shore grows weaker and has doubts about her own good nature when she returns home after a ten-month absence, her sisters become the final authorities on the matter. In a footnote they say that if Emily had morally deteriorated, “No one else discovered it” (337). Did they know her better than she knew herself? Near the end, on the last page of the journal, they take the liberty of glossing and encroaching on Shore’s assessment of her own death portrait. And at the very end they will have the last word, appropriating and omitting Emily Shore’s own closure, “written in a tremulous, yet quite legible hand, on June 24th, a fortnight before her release” (351). I now fear these editors may have tailored for their protagonist a life nearly as fictional as Gaskell’s life of Brontë.
Nov. 19—An unexpurgated Shore will never come my way, but I have made what small peace I can with the other sisters Shore and can turn back to Emily Shore’s own art of journal writing. Granting the overall shape of her book may be her sisters’, Shore’s own narrative art shines through. To begin with, Emily Shore is indeed polyvoiced; she creates a Bakhtinian heteroglossia. Entries come in the form of questions, questions and answers, dialogues, and retellings. [xx] There are observations by Shore and by others, and short narratives or tales within the context of entries. I follow the antics and life span of a pet lark from day to day in the summer of 1833. This ministory is shaped to intrigue, with ups and downs, denouements and closure.
Sometimes Shore’s entries are staccato and matter of fact, sometimes metaphoric and poetic. A traveler’s voice comes in to talk about the sights of London or of Exeter, or a sea voyage to Madeira, or Madeira’s people and landscape. It has a different kind of authority mixed with modesty. Always, though, I sense a characteristic Emily Shore authenticity. When, for example, Shore takes over a story secondhand and reinflects a man’s voice, as she does so often, she gives us her sense of the man first, then what seems his, not her, story. So we hear Charles Shore on Sweden (13) and Shore’s father on fox hunting (24–25) and later, when Shore is older, a Mr. W. on the supernatural (201–2)—and for a moment we enter their lives too.
These twice-told tales and other representations of an outer world are counterpointed by Shore’s more inward musings about the art and nature of journals. There is no doubt in my mind that Shore’s journal offers an excellent example of a diarist reflecting on the implications of journal writing. I recall that the only two experts on diaries who have discussed Shore in any detail have also thought this. Ponsonby wrote that “no diarist, not even Amiel himself, can have examined more profoundly the whole psychology of diary writing and faced the problems of the honesty of introspection and the questions of motive in writing and the eventual fate of a diary with greater perspicacity than this girl writing at the age of eighteen after keeping a journal for seven years” (205). More recently, Harriet Blodgett has remarked that Shore confronted the “problem that self-consciousness poses for the diarist” (60) as well as anyone has ever done. Both Ponsonby and Blodgett cite my favorite, clear-sighted entry by Shore (July 6, 1838) to prove their points:
I am sure it [her journal] is a memoir of my character, and the changes and progress of my mind—its views, tastes, and feelings. [xxi] But I am conscious that, at the same time, it is far, far from being as complete as with this end it ought to be. … it has become to me a valuable index of my mind, and has been the record of faults and follies which have made my cheek burn on the re-perusal. I have poured out my feelings into these later pages; I have written them on the impulse of the moment, as well as from the coolness of calm deliberation. I have written much that I would show only to a very few, and much that I would on no account submit to any human eye. Still, even now, I cannot entirely divest myself of an uncomfortable notion that the whole may some future day, when I am in my grave, be read by some individual, and this notion has, even without my being often aware of it, cramped me, I am sure. I have by no means confessed myself in my journal; I have not opened my whole heart; I do not write my feelings and thoughts for the inspection of another—Heaven forbid!—but I imagine the vague fear I have above mentioned has grown into a sort of unconscious habit, instinctively limiting the extent of my confidence in ink and paper, so that the secret chamber of the heart … does not find in my pen a key to unlock it. (261–62)
Shore goes on to say that this journal will be open to her current family and, poignantly, some day to her children, but from July 3 on, she will keep a second journal into which she can pour “all the secret feelings of my heart” (263).
I now begin to think that Emily Shore, the apprentice author and writer of published essays on birds, had it in mind to publish the nonsecret journal that we now know only through her sisters. She handled it like a professional, even providing the volumes with indexes. And her other entries on her writer’s art show a self-conscious candor and a thoughtfulness about craft. On April 24, 1837, Shore reflects that “I am always apt to see things in richer colours at first sight, and then, writing about them while my fancy is yet heated, I unintentionally exaggerate” (195). She is also acutely aware of the inadequacy of even the most exaggerated language to catch a summer’s day (194). And she knows too that with writing come not just sequence and succession but selectivity and choice of tone. These she also ponders in 1837, wondering whether or not to [xxii] ridicule an evening party. “I think not,” she decides, “though such subjects would give variety to my journal” (233). By 1837, after a half-dozen years of daily writing, Shore was enough at ease with her form to talk to her journal about itself.
Nov. 21—This year and more of journal keeping about Shore’s work leads me to see the seductions of the form. Linearity is not essential, doubling back makes sense, and one can move from the outer world to any degree of interiority with some ease. Shore, I think, liked all of this, especially that move from outer to inner. The journal consistently shows her reactions to family, friends, the natural world, and the world of books and presents her personal history in intersection with the history of her time—the Reform Bill of 1832, the New Poor Law of 1834, the newly opened London Zoo. But as it evolves, the journal most of all reveals Shore’s representations of alternative Shore protagonists within the text. In writing about self, Shore constructs many alternate selves. The long passage I quoted from July of 1838 as much as tells us so. Emily Shore had written a “memoir of my character, and the changes and progress of my mind” (261), but in the course of the writing, her journal altered from one about a mind as an intellect and entity to one about a mind on a spiritual voyage. As I review it yet again, I discover that Shore’s journal encodes the progress of at least three prominent selves: the student self, the girl–young woman self, and the dying self, struggling to accept its own termination. These selves both crisscross each other and, at times, coalesce.
Nov. 22—I have spent the morning scanning the text to ferret out the evolution of the student self. She is omnipresent, but less prominent as the dying self takes over. I note that this student is as self-conscious in her methodology, and as self-critical, as is the journal keeper. On February 10, 1835, she determines to study botany differently, for, she tells the journal, “I have hitherto been a very superficial botanist, attending to little besides the classification, and not studying the habits, properties, and uses of plants, as I [xxiii] do the habits of birds” (89). Student Shore, it seems, has a different plan of attack for her various studies. Herodotus she plunders for stories to feed her own intended dramas and narrative poems (125); the weather she measures with barometer and thermometer three times a day, at 8:30 A.M., 1:00 P.M., (151); the architectural plans she draws she afterwards writes “minute descriptions of …, with the measurements, furniture, uses, etc., of all the apartments” (136); chronology she memorizes in slots of time represented on charts—by November of 1837 she has learned 365 separate dates with the intention of adding to that number continually (224); and history she learns by reading different books on the same historical period (224). When her tastes change, she analyzes why. Fiction has less appeal by 1837, but that must be an acceptable change of taste because it gives her “a greater enjoyment of soberer and more useful reading” (184).
As the journal progresses, the voracity and intensity of Shore’s study decrease. Shore matures but simultaneously faces death and is forced to treat her education differently. By the beginning of 1838 she lightens up her tone—“I have crammed a good deal of fresh information into my pate to-day” (237)—and begins thinking about self-cultivation not in and of itself but as it is useful to others. It is part of her new piety. Nevertheless, as an honest young woman, she also mourns the loss of strength for her rambles and observations of nature and her studies. In her last half year she admits how much happier she was as a child, fully engaged in those pursuits. Most poignant of all is the day she sorts out her manuscripts in Madeira, two months before her death, and smiles at her own eclecticism:
I was highly amused at the curious mixture of every kind of subject which I found in these confused heaps of manuscripts. Fragments of unfinished poems, Latin exercises, and rough reports of conversations, scribbled over one sheet; sketches of epics, translations from Greek plays, notes of sermons, and algebraical calculations, mixed together on a second; on another, grammatical rules for an imaginary language, references to a plan for an [xxiv] invented palace, sums in arithmetic, scenes of unfinished dramas, and lists of dramatis personae are scribbled and scrawled all over with heads and figures of men and horses, likenesses of unconscious sitters, and outlines of trees and flowers. So miscellaneous have been my studies and amusements. (340–41)
Miscellaneous indeed! In reviewing Shore’s studies, I notice that the sisters do not quite approve of their rigor. At thirteen Shore sketched out her daily regimen of study: from being up before seven thirty memorizing Greek and Latin, through to reading Fuseli’s lectures to her mother, to lessons with papa, to more Greek and Latin. In their note, the editors want to make sure that we realize that this severe timetable was voluntary and often interrupted by nature rambles (31). We are not, they remind us, to blame the other Shores for imposing such rigor on young Emily; it may have been what killer her.
In about 1836, Shore’s narrative of learning begins to give way to representations of her young-woman self, and it is possible that adolescent insecurity may account for the refocusing of the journal that both Shore and her sisters gloss. Protagonist Shore is more self-consciously and traditionally feminine in the later volumes of the journal. To begin with, her new amusements are more socially and humanly directed. She visits and walks out with friends, and she consents to net a purse for a young male friend. Out for the evening to a concert, she reflects on and resists the stereotyping of the “bright eyes and sweet smiles” of the ladies (213). It is in these same last years that Shore begins to look at Mackworth as her child self, passionately pursuing natural history, and to think about the possibility of her own children reading her journal. And she tones down her assertive critical self, passing judgment on Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens but claiming to be “ill qualified … to pass any opinion on the matter” (228). Her room, she finds, suits her—yet it is “grotesque and singular” (218), a space, perhaps to suit the more awkward self she feels she has become. She is indeed “a different creature from what [she] was three years ago” (280), one more vulnerable to the opinion of others (269). This suggests that [xxv] women autobiographers may interrupt their own male-identified selfhood—in Shore’s case her intellectual childhood—when the suppressed story of a part of their femaleness can no longer be kept in check. For awhile, however, Shore, the narrator, keeps the two stories going side by side.
Nov. 29—Rethinking the idea of the two stories I believe now that it was really Shore’s representation of her dying self more than her young-woman self that began to silence the energetic voices of her childhood. I ache to see that by her journal’s end young Shore is writing a kind of holy dying. Death already begins to stalk its pages before the midpoint of the journal, just after Shore’s first visit to a London physician in the summer of 1836 for a consultation about her illness. After this, the mortality rate of a nearby family—who have lost four of their young people—stuns Shore, who devotes her entire entry for August 18 to their quick deaths, possibly by consumption. From this point on death dominates. Shore the narrator seems never to miss discussing any youthful deaths brought to her attention. Nor does she miss recording the illnesses of friends and examining their mental attitudes toward illness, nor empathizing with other consumptives like her relative Winthrop Praed or the other people who are, like her, in warmer Madeira as a last resort. The Shore way of reading changes, too. Not only does the dying Shore read devotional literature, but she rereads works like Hamlet, now emphasizing the pain and melancholy of the central hero.
For awhile, Shore’s student self heroically struggles with the dying self. The brain gets “muddy and rusty” (165) during long bouts of illness, and Shore the student regrets all of 1836 as a year “wasted, as far as study is concerned” (171). But she fights back, sadly suspecting all along that those who say too much study can cause consumption may be right. She will put herself on a new regimen because she “cannot bear the idea of living, even in sickness, without systematically acquiring knowledge” (221), and she will put off the more difficult subjects until she is “quite restored to health” (221). There is high drama in these inner conflicts and even [xxvi] more in the irony that comes from knowing the sad outcome of Shore’s story before she does.
The last chapter of Shore’s dying comes in Madeira, where she has been taken for the beneficial climate. Her eye is now trained on death. From aboard ship, she sees another ship in mourning, painted in a special blue stripe. She would like to be intrigued by Madeira, but it is a “beautiful stranger” (319), and she herself is in mourning for the natural world of England. She watches Portuguese funeral processions and visits the English cemetery where she knows she will be laid to rest. Through all this, she sometimes feels she is improving in health; in March she excitedly arranges her books in new shelves. In May, however, she admits that “on the 4th of April I broke a blood-vessel, and am now dying of consumption, in great suffering, and may not live many weeks. God be merciful to me a sinner” (350). Weak as she is, Shore’s dying self takes up the pen as long as she can hold it. And I must stop retelling her story.
Dec. 5—I speak to my publisher and decide that our edition will be a centenary reproduction of the first edition, the 1891 journal. I have a last look at its 1898 counterpart, identical in text but revealing the busy hand of Arabella Shore still at work in yet other ways. Three new features were added in 1898: a table of contents with a list of illustrations; a number of Emily Shore’s own sketches, alluded to in the Shore sisters’ introduction; and an index, which may or may not have been drawn from Emily Shore’s original categories in her own volume indexes. The index and three of the pictures can be retained for our edition.* Accustomed now to Arabella Shore’s ways, I am not surprised at her choice of pictures. Natural history is not represented, just as the London Zoo was not, and important men, including all the Shore men, dominate the selections, all of which are of people, not places or things. [xxvii] People, especially family and anecdotes about them, seem to have delighted the younger Shore sisters. I recall how, as editor, Arabella or Louisa could not resist refining one of Emily Shore’s descriptions of her mother’s sisters, the Twopenys, by adding a clever footnote recalling that collectively, on account of their beauty, the six sisters were called the “Splendid Shilling.”
With respect to the pictures, I am most intrigued by the ingenious choice of frontispieces for the two editions. In 1891, the frontispiece is the death portrait mentioned on the last page of the text (351)—Emily Shore, facing her viewer head on, with her stuffed birds, the hoopoe and bee eater, on her lap. Weak and dying, Shore herself had heard this was an excellent likeness and cared enough to say so at her journal’s close. But in 1898, the frontispiece is by Emily Shore, a self-portrait. It is inscribed “Your very affectionate sister, Emily Shore—Monday, 1837” and faces away from the title page. Positioned in this way, Emily Shore’s figure seems to be turning its back on her text, inscribing not just the picture but the journal to one of the sisters who in the end determined the shape of that journal for posterity. To me, far preferable is the serene, direct gaze of “Margaret Emily Shore, Aged Nineteen Years” with birds in lap, fronting us as does her name on the journal’s title page just opposite.
Mar. 1—The eleventh hour has passed. Two weeks ago, the University Press of Virginia did a quick, thorough copyediting of my typescript and I an equivalently quick return. For all practical purposes, we are in print with our centenary edition of the 1891 text. And now this news from London. Anne Summers, curator of manuscripts at the British Library, has sent on an announcement of an auction at Phillips, Son & Neale, New Bond Street. As I read that two manuscript volumes of the journal have surfaced and will be auctioned on 14 March 1991, at one o’clock, I think about my letters of inquiry to the Shores and wonder what desk or attic has yielded up its treasures. I look carefully to see which volumes are to be sold: volume seven, running from 6 October 1836 to 10 April 1837, describing life at Exeter and including an index, and volume [xxviii] twelve, the death volume. Phillips advises potential buyers that these two appear to be “random survivals”; the whereabouts of the rest of the manuscripts are still unknown.
As I scrutinize the announcement, I am confirmed in my discomfort with the sister editors. From even the short abstracts printed by Phillips, it is apparent that editing did radically change the nature of Emily Shore’s journal. What Phillips calls “the final harrowing page of the journal” has, for example, been deleted. Characteristically, the editors ended their text with images of their family, but Emily Shore went on painstakingly to describe her solo battle to accept death and Providence and to detail her declining existence, right down to her daily intake of nourishment—goat’s milk and fruits. Editing also altered the focus of a Heaven-earth dichotomy that troubled the nature-loving young woman at the onset of summer’s warmth. Much as she might have liked to, Shore refused to cling to her beloved earth. Nevertheless, she tells us, she would have liked more time to come to peace with the idea of Heaven. In the light of these printed fragments from the manuscripts, Shore’s death now appears even more heartrending than her sisters allowed. And according to the Phillips announcement, so is the deterioration of her handwriting. The editors conclude her journal by telling us that Shore’s last words were written “in a tremulous, yet quite legible hand” (351); the announcement, however, reports a “dramatic deterioration of her once meticulous handwriting [that] gives these last entries a poignancy to rival that of Scott’s Antarctic journal.”
Like the final volume, the volume of 1837 also seems to have been heavily edited. One of its omitted passages reveals Shore’s disdain for the wiles of Victorian courtship ritual. With relief, Emily Shore notes that her own education has been different from those of young women who have been trained by their mothers expressly to be attractive to young gentlemen, as if that were their sole purpose in life. She herself refuses to become plagued with an obsession to marry. Should marriage come, it will come naturally, as do other things in the universe. Here, once more, the sisters Shore appear to have expurgated one of Margaret Emily’s self-representations [xxix] of adolescent sexuality and to have minimized her divergence from Victorian norms. In another passage that never entered the published versions, this earlier volume also directs attention to Shore’s ill health, indicating her long-time concern with the discomfort of her consumption and describing a cough that feels nailed onto her lungs. This allusion to a crucifying, Christ-like burden may have seemed a religious impropriety to the editors, who chose to eliminate it from their text. Finally, the Phillips announcement reveals an unpublished conclusion to the 1837 volume. This is another segment on journal-writing and one in which Shore confesses—perhaps to her sisters’ dismay—that the journal, not family or friends, is her closest companion. With a fanfare of exclamations, Shore bids a dramatic and loving farewell to her volume—the trusted holder of secrets imparted to no human being, a confidante that anyone might envy, and the vessel for intimate feelings of self and soul.
For readers of this current edition, it now appears that despite her own farewells and mine, there will be more of the indomitable, resilient Emily Shore to anticipate. After 14 March 1991, doors may open for another look at this remarkable young polymath who, after years in obscurity, has resurfaced twice in her centenary year—once in this edition and now once more in these newly available manuscripts. Long may her resurrections continue.
[xxx]- Aitken, Robert. English Diaries of the XIX Century 1800–1850. New York: Penguin Books, 1944.
- Batts, John Stuart. British Manuscript Diaries of the Nineteenth Century: An Annotated Listing. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976.
- Blodgett, Harriet. Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
- The Dictionary of National Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1921.
- Fothergill, Robert A. Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.
- Kristeva, Julia. About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows. London: Boyars, 1977.
- Ponsonby, Arthur. More English Diaries: Further Reviews of Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century with an Introduction on Diary Writing. London: Methuen, 1927.
- Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
- Shore, Arabella. Dante for Beginners. London: Chapman and Hall, 1886.
- ———, ed. Poems by Louisa Shore with a Memoir by her Sister Arabella Shore. London: John Lane, 1897.
- Shore, Louisa. “The Emancipation of Women.” Westminster Review 45 n.s. (1874): 137–74.
- Shore, Margaret Emily. Journal of Emily Shore. London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner & Co., 1891 and 1898.
- Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
