A Full House and Fine Singing: Diaries and Letters of Sadie Harper Allen

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald teaches English at the University of Western
Ontario.

Fifteen-year-old Sadie Harper first began her diary on New Year’s Day,
1890, writing in a tiny pocket diary from the North American Life
Assurance Company, and she continued to write in a yearly succession of
these diaries, with varying degrees of faithfulness, for the next eight
years. She also wrote a number of entertaining letters to her family in
Shediac, N.B., during a visit to Great Britain and the Continent with
her husband, Frank Allen, and later from her home in Winnipeg. Social
historian Mary Biggar Peck has organized the liveliest of this material
into a collection that reflects the changing pattern of Sadie’s young
life and attempts to create a sense of progression and order from a
wealth of everyday detail.

Parts 1 to 4 consist exclusively of Sadie’s diary entries, which
relate her adolescence in Shediac; her attendance at Mount Allison
Ladies’ College; her return home to care for two ailing parents; and
her early courtship with her future husband. Part 5—Sadie’s letters
from England, Europe, and Winnipeg—offers an amusing view of her
introduction to life abroad. The selections present, however, an
incomplete picture of Sadie’s life, and, although Peck characterizes
Sadie’s writing as a need “to confide her worries about friends,
family and sweethearts . . . and what her future would hold,” there is
very little personal disclosure in these pages. What Sadie’s diary
does reveal are the day-to-day occupations, entertainments, and concerns
of a young woman of the period, and the reader is introduced to a lively
character whose household was always filled with friends, fun, and
music.

Peck’s introductions to each section offer some sense of continuity,
attempting to fill in the many blanks in Sadie’s life as it unfolds.
Yet, while the text lives up to the promise of the back-cover blurb, to
provide “an authentic glimpse into the life of a young woman in
turn-of-the-century Canada,” the reader receives just that and no
more: a brief and intriguing glimpse. Poignantly, the final letter,
written October 13th, 1915, and addressed to her mother, remains
unfinished: the following day, Sadie Allen died of a heart attack at the
age of 40.