Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada 1760-2000"There are two ladies in the province, I am told, who read," writes Frances Brooke's Arabella Fermor, "but both are above fifty and are regarded as prodigies of erudition." Brooke's The History of Emily Montague (1769) was the first work of fiction to be set in Canada, and also the first book to reflect on the situation of the woman writer there. Her analysis of the experience of writing in Canada is continued by the five other writers considered in this study - Susanna Moodie, Sara Jeannette Duncan, L.M. Montgomery, Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields. All of these authors examine the social position of the woman of letters in Canada, the intellectual stimulation available to her, the literary possibilities of Canadian subject-matter, and the practical aspects of reading, writing, and publishing in a (post)colonial country. This book turns on the ways in which those aspects of authorship and literary culture in Canada have been inscribed in imaginative, autobiographical and critical texts by the six authors. It traces the evolving situation of the Canadian woman writer over the course of two centuries, and explores the impact of social and cultural change on the experience of writing in Canada. |
Contents
| 3 | |
| 19 | |
Sara Jeannette Duncan in the camp of the Philistines | 49 |
Pure Canadian LM Montgomery and her Emily Trilogy | 83 |
Influential Circles Carol Shields and the Canadian Literary Canon | 117 |
Forest and fairy stuff Margaret Atwoods Wilderness Tips | 137 |
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Common terms and phrases
Afterword Alias Grace American Anne of Green Arabella artistic Box Garden British Brooke's Bush Cana Canada Canadian authors Canadian Literature Canadian Novel Canadian Women Canadian writer canon career Carol Shields Catharine Parr Traill Celibate Season characters colonial Cousin Cinderella creative Cruzzi Death by Landscape dian Elizabeth Emily Climbs Emily Montague Emily's Quest English Epperly Essays on Canadian experience explores female fiction Frances Brooke gender genre Girl Green Gables heroine History of Emily imaginative Imperialist inspiration Journals of Susanna L.M. Montgomery Lady letters Lifetime living London Lorne Magazine Margaret Atwood Mark Hurdlestone Mary Rubio Mary Swann McClelland & Stewart Moodie's Moon narrative narrator Ontario Ottawa poems poet poetry published Quebec repr Roughing Sara Jeannette Duncan Selena Shields's Small Ceremonies social society story Survival Susanna Moodie texts thematic criticism things Thurston tion Toronto tradition vision Wacousta Wilderness Tips woman women writers writing wrote
Popular passages
Page 4 - Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.
Page 3 - The danger of pedantry and presumption in a woman, — of her exciting envy in one sex and jealousy in the other, — of her exchanging the graces of imagination for the severity and preciseness of a scholar, would be, I own, sufficient to frighten me from the ambition of seeing my girl remarkable for learning.
Page 4 - I early in life discovered, by the mere force of genius, that there were two characters only in which one might take a thousand little innocent freedoms, without being censured by a parcel of impertinent old women — those of a Bel Esprit and a Methodist ; and the latter not being in my style, I chose to set up for the former, in which I have had the happiness to succeed so much beyond my hopes, that the first question now asked amongst polite people, when a new piece comes out, is, " What does...