ESC: English Studies in Canada

Edna Staebler is best known in Canada for a series of cookbooks about Mennonite cooking and culture that began with the publication of Food That Really Schmecks in 1968.I remember the 1979 book, More Food That Really Schmecks. I took the book out of the library because of that word in the title, the delicious-sounding “schmecks.” But the book was more than a recipe collection: Staebler introduced me to a culture I had never seen. Her stories about Bevvy Martin and her other friends who lived and cooked simply made more of an impression on me than the recipes. I never forgot her descriptions of Mennonite women and the ways they went about their everyday lives in the kitchen.

Staebler's cookbooks created memorable portraits of people like these because they are a kind of life writing, a description and celebration of the lives of women who often lead lives which go unrecorded and unrecognized. Life writing is not found in a formal autobiography or biography but is found in unpublished, or unlikely, places—letters, diaries, and even cookbooks, genres that have historically been where women have written about their own experiences or where they have most often worked (in the kitchen, on the farm, or in the home). The study of this private writing that was not published as writing about the self is also called life writing, as scholars try to bring into view the hidden history of “ordinary” women who wrote in this way or who kept private writing separate from their public selves and public writing. In her professional life as a journalist, a travel author, and most famously as a cookbook author, Edna Staebler sought to make the lives of the people she wrote about as vivid and real as the lives of fictional characters. Throughout her career, she was a practitioner of life writing that most often was about and for women. And, like Staebler's efforts to get her friend Bevvy to slow down her cooking long enough to let Staebler write down what she was doing, much of this writing is a record of the difficulties of capturing seldom-recorded lives in words.

The same sense of writing as a potentially difficult process of recording life forms the core of the excerpts from Staebler's diaries that Christl Verduyn has selected and edited in Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries. Verduyn asks us to understand the diary entries of Must Write as another example of life writing, which she calls “a genre and a critical practice encompassing many kinds of texts” (3), including letters, diaries, and other personal documents. Verdun argues that the public writing of [End Page 240] Edna Staebler must be considered in light of her unpublished diary writing and, even, that Staebler's diaries should be considered her life's work. In these excerpts from the thousands of pages of diary writing that Edna Staebler created and kept for more than five decades, Verduyn has selected passages about Staebler's life as a writer in order to show that Staebler's public writing life was supported, and even to some extent eclipsed, by her entries about her frustrations with writing and her doubts about her ability to be the kind of writer she dreamed of becoming.

Verduyn's introduction to Must Write sets the stage for reading the diary entries not as biography but as important personal writing which shows how an “ordinary” woman struggled with family problems and the idea of conducting a career that was unusual for a Canadian women during the first half of the twentieth century. Verduyn argues that recent scholarship on diary writing shows how diaries have as much literary quality and are as worth examining as published works, particularly for feminist critics who have brought the issues connected to women's private writing to the fore of feminist theory and literary criticism since the 1980s (4–6). Verduyn also says that Staebler's diaries add to the growing corpus of life writing...