Early Voices: Portraits of Canada by Women Writers, 1639-1914

By Mary Alice Downie and Elizabeth Jane Errington

This selection of writings by 29 women, known and unknown, professional and amateur, presents a unique portrait of Canada through time and space, from the 17th to the early 20th century, from the Maritimes to British Columbia and the Far North. There is a range of voices from high-born wives of governors general, to an Icelandic immigrant and a fisherman’s wife in Labrador. A Loyalist wife and mother describes the first hard weather in New Brunswick, a seasick nun tells of a dangerous voyage out from France, a famous children’s writer writes home about the fun of canoeing, and a German general’s wife describes habitant customs. All demonstrate how women’s experiences not only shared, but helped shape this new country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Oct 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781459705319

Mary Alice Downie

Mary Alice Downie has written and edited twenty-eight books for children and adults. Her many books include And Some Brought Flowers with Mary Hamilton, and The Well-Filled Cupboard with Barbara Robertson. She lives in Kingston, Ontario.

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Eklunds.

Our Assorted Ancestors

BY MARY ALICE DOWNIE

Many of the writings of the women who came to Canada during the last four centuries have been published. There are the letters of Marie de l’Incarnation, the intrepid Ursuline who sailed from Dieppe for the New World in 1639, and the journal of Baroness von Riedesel, wife of the general of the Hessian mercenaries during the American Revolution. Letitia Hargrave’s account of life in the remote fur-trading post of York Factory in northern Manitoba is available, as are Juliana Horatia Ewing’s descriptions of the garrison town of Fredericton just after Confederation, and Lady Aberdeen’s expressions of dismay of the violence of hockey in late nineteenth-century Ottawa. (She was later to change her mind and become a fan.)

The books of the expatriate branch of the redoubtable Strickland sisters, Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie, and Winter Studies and Summer Rambles of the Victorian scholar Anna Jameson are valued staples of Canadian literature. Unfortunately, it is specialists rather than the general reader who are familiar with these other illuminating materials. Although feminist scholars are devotedly tilling the field, with some exceptions, they tend to write about the early writers, using brief excerpts to support a thesis.

Some — too many — years ago, Barbara Robertson and I decided to make a collection, providing substantial examples of writing by 29 women, known and unknown, professional and amateur, who visited or lived in Canada between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, allowing them to portray their lives in the woods, in the Maritimes, Quebec, in muddy York, on the desolate or flower-strewn prairies, in British Columbia, and the Far North. We hope to send people to the library or bookstore — or, increasingly, online — to share their reactions to a frequently difficult, sometimes terrifying, but ultimately satisfying New World. We have Mrs. Jameson, eminent scholar and friend of Browning, exhilarated by her trip with the voyageurs to Lake Superior: the wildest and most extraordinary tour you can imagine. Susan Allison, living in a cabin near Kelowna, without potable water, rattlers dangling among the pots and pans, home schooling her 14 children, writes: I lived a perfectly ideal life at that time.

What relevance do these letters home, journals, memoirs, and biographies have for the modern reader? Certain themes, significant and minor, recur and resonate still: the welcome breakup of ice, the sweet pleasures of trips to the sugar-camp, the risks of mushrooms, the finding of fiddleheads. We continue to suffer annually from the blight of black flies and no see ’ems, to dread that ominous buzz described by Janey Canuck in her sprightly riff on mosquitoes. Winter was more dangerous then, but even with central heating we must endure the cold on venturing outside in January. Indeed, with the unpleasant prospect of a future of ever-increasing hurricanes, droughts, floods, and forest fires, we can profit by reading early settlers’ accounts. They were better able to cope with extreme conditions than we are. Six days of the Ice Storm in Kingston, shared with indignant cats, convinced us of that.

Margaret Dickie Michener’s aching loneliness at sudden widowhood and Letitia Hargrave’s heartbreak at losing a child speak to all generations. Today’s working mothers, juggling children and careers, will enjoy the vignette recorded elsewhere of Nellie McClung’s son Horace, leading home his young brother, "much spattered with mud, and one stocking at half mast, hurrying him along the lane and in through the secret entrance in the back fence, saying: ‘Quick, now! It’s a good thing I got you before the Telegram got a picture of you — Nellie McClung’s neglected child!’ — this with bitter scorn. And any twenty-first-century writer will feel a pang of recognition reading Catharine Parr Traill’s final letter, written two days before her death at 97, on the return of a manuscript about a history of Canadian birds: I had many misgivings as to the merits of the composition, &c — In fact I never see any good in my writings till they are in print and even then I wonder how that event came to pass."

In the creation of this anthology there were problems, of course. Every reader is her own anthologist; reviewers always complain because a favourite has not been included. Just for sport, we decided to use Catharine Parr Traill’s letter about visiting Government House in Ottawa rather than an example of her balanced advice to settlers or botanical works. We did not include Elizabeth Simcoe, who to the consternation of observers, happy as a lark, camped out in Captain Cook’s canvas house in bowers made from the limbs of trees. Many biographies and place names preserve her memory. Our decision to omit Moodie may seem perverse when, as distinguished critic Michael Peterman writes: she has so much to say and in such interesting and compelling ways. Indeed, her description of canoeing is as lyrical as any of Anna Jameson’s or Juliana Horatia Ewing’s accounts of Canadian nature:

The pure beauty of the Canadian water, the somber but august grandeur of the vast forest that hemmed us in on every side and shut us out from the rest of the world, soon cast a magic spell upon our spirits, and we began to feel charmed with the freedom and solitude around us. Every object was new to us. We felt as if we were the first discoverers of every beautiful flower and stately tree that attracted our attention, and we gave names to fantastic rocks and fairy isles, and raised imaginary houses and bridges on every picturesque spot which we floated past in our aquatic excursions. I learned the use of the paddle, and became quite a proficient in the gentle craft. (The Wilderness, and Our Indian Friends")

We would have had no difficulty in finding an entertaining selection. But she is so well-represented elsewhere, the one early woman writer everyone has heard of, that we decided to use our limited space to introduce our readers to lesser-known voices.

We wrestled with the fact that, so often, our writers were well-educated upper- and middle-class British women. With glad cries we fell upon A Home-help in Canada by Ella Sykes — At last, we thought, a sturdy working-class observer! Alas, the frontispiece of the book portrayed a grande dame in a magnificent hat worthy of Freya Stark. Her other books, such as Through Persia on a Side-Saddle, compelling reading still, reflect her experiences as sister and frequent hostess of diplomat — and spy — Sir Percy Sykes during his postings in Central Asia.

We admit to gaps — we would like to have had more examples from other groups. We consulted scholars who confirmed our impression that either the women simply weren’t here, weren’t writing in English, or did not have the luxury of time to write at length. We regard the discovery of half-Chinese Sui Sin Far, also known as Edith Maude Eaton, as a triumph. (The novelist and journalist, Onoto Watanna, looked promising, until we discovered that she was Sui Sin Far’s sister Winifred, masquerading as an exotic half-Japanese.) No doubt, the minute we send in final proofs, a splendid Mennonite or Tibetan diary will appear.

As always, there was the dreaded question of order. Should it be geographical, chronological, by subject? The book is shaped by the pattern of settlement moving across the country in time and space. We wrestled with which passage to choose and how to select — as there was such richness. Where possible, we have kept a particular passage complete, but demands of length did sometimes require selective editing noted with ellipses. Spelling and punctuation are presented as in the original publication.

Not all our discoveries were made in the library. There were serendipitous surprises while travelling. The Quails’ Gate Winery in the Okanagan now operates the Allison House Market, refurbished from the days of Susan Allison as a centre for local artisans’ works and books — as well as picnics. After visiting the landmark Cliff House in San Francisco, we enjoyed reading Lady Dufferin’s account of it in 1876, although late on a winter afternoon, accompanied by two tired small girls, we didn’t see close to the hotel . . . some great rocky islands, upon which sea-lions are basking in the sun, and pelicans stand combing out their feathers, nor could we dine on their celebrated fare of oysters, ‘Porter-hall steak,’ and omelette. It’s still possible to admire the terrifying but majestic sight of Montmorency Falls from the spot where Governor Haldimand built a little hut which hung directly over the waterfall as a surprise for Baroness von Riedesel.

There have been other agreeable connections. For a time, co-editor Barbara lived next door to descendants of Baroness von Riedesel. A friend who grew up in Peterborough has memories of being chased home from school, pelted with snowballs by modern Stricklands.

Even in the twenty-first century it is possible to have a strong feeling of relationship with our assorted ancestors. Much of the work was done at an old wooden cottage on an island in the Rideau Canal, with no heat except for a big brick fireplace. (We don’t go there in winter.) As we shiver on chilly fall mornings — it’s often colder inside than out — it’s easy to identify with the past. Hepaticas peep from the leaves in spring, trilliums carpet the land, just as Mrs. Traill described them. We have shared a sunset with a racoon family, admired the Egyptian profile of the Blue Heron standing splendidly on the end of the dock, heard the crash of a golden maple leaf when it lands in the silence of October. As I listen to the wolves — really coyotes — howling in the distance at night, it brings memories of a cherished sylvan legend in my own family. My great-grandmother was chased through the woods by wolves, barefoot, with my infant grandfather in her arms.

One great sadness is attached to the completion of this anthology. Barbara Robertson and I collaborated three times: on The Wind Has Wings, The Well-filled Cupboard, and Chatzkel the Hunter. We laughed and argued, brandishing the latest treasure from the library, commiserated with each other on difficulties with books we wrote separately. For many years, during weekly lunches at Queen’s University Faculty Club, we shared the problems and joys of family life. (Like Mother Lears, we had three daughters each.) Just after the bulk of the reading was done, the manuscript accepted, Barbara suffered a devastating stroke. She lingered and died in 2006. My literary journeys were then solitary, at least until Jane arrived. As a passionate Canadian historian, how Barabara would have enjoyed and significantly contributed to the final stages. Nellie McClung wrote of her friend and collaborator, Emily Murphy — although on a grander stage: It was fitting that the last thing recorded of her was that she had gone to the library seeking information.

The Diversity of Voices

BY ELIZABETH JANE ERRINGTON

In the last 20 years or so, women’s voices have begun to make their way into our consciousness. It is no longer extraordinary to find biographies of or by women on our bookshelves, and some of our most celebrated novelists and poets are women. It is nonetheless surprising how unfamiliar we are with women authors of our past. We still tend to see New France, British North America, and nineteenth-century Canada as worlds inhabited by strong men and silent women. Although a number of scholars have been exploring the texture of these women’s lives, their voices continue to be muffled, lost amid the panoply of accounts about politicians and priests, soldiers and farmers, canal workers and immigrant labourers who were, many continue to believe, the real makers of the nation. When women are discussed, they most often are placed in the private realm of hearth and home — living apart from and in a world that was fundamentally different than that of their male companions. Because many did not work for wages, or engage in politics or business, it is frequently assumed that most of our foremothers had little to say or, when they did, they spoke with one voice that reflected their shared domestic culture and view of the world.

This wonderfully eclectic collection challenges these assumptions. Ranging widely in time and space, we are presented with a collage of colours and a cacophony of sound. The authors here and the women they wrote about spoke with many voices and had varied reactions to the world around them. Their lives were invariably shaped and mediated by their class, their race, their age, their marital status, when they arrived or lived on the continent, and, of course, their personal expectations and beliefs. There is no question that many of the women who appear in these brief excerpts shared experiences that, in some ways, collapsed time and space. Although pioneering wives on the Canadian prairies had little in common with the wife of a visiting governor general, the delights and difficulties of being a wife and mother in one century were often echoed in another; and the aspirations of a woman adventurer in Newfoundland in many ways are reflected in stories of trekking across the Rocky Mountains. But each author had her own unique reaction to her world, and these both mirrored and helped to shape the rich record of Canadian experience.

Some of the authors, like Anna Jameson, Ella Sykes, and Ladies Dufferin and Aberdeen, were just visitors, and they wrote to inform their readers — either family members or a much broader general public — about what they saw and felt. Such often carefully crafted accounts contrast sharply, in tone as well as in content, with settler Margaret Michener’s very private diary, in which she recorded her daily activities and which also seems to have provided her with a vehicle to begin to come to terms with her husband’s death. Anne Langton’s and Charlotte Bompas’s personal journals, on the other hand, or Juliana Ewing’s letters to her mother, although never intended for publication, were written for the benefit of anxious family members and friends. These three women, and many others, wanted both to convey something of the rhythm of their lives and to reassure those at home that all was well in this new world. Some authors here, like new arrivals Mary Ann Shadd and Emily Elizabeth Beavan, consciously wrote to inform and to persuade prospective emigrants about the advantage of moving to Canada; as Emily Carr, Laura Salverson, and others recounted stories of their childhood, they wanted to convey to an interested public something of a world gone by.

Whether by visitor or new settler or resident, almost all the accounts that appear here chronicle a personal journey. Some were clearly travellers coming to a new land. Like so many who dared to cross the Atlantic under sail, Mère Cécile confronted the ravages of storms and fears of shipwreck. Lady Dufferin and adventurers Anna Jameson, Mary Warren, and Mina Hubbard wrote about their travels within the continent itself, and were determined to capture — in words and sometimes with photographs — the texture and variety of the nation. In her letter to a daughter of an old friend, Catharine Parr Traill recounted her visit to the rarefied world of Canadian high society. Nellie McClung and Maria Adamowska told stories of their childhood and of family journeys to find and make new homes. Emily Carr travelled into her family’s past; Margaret Michener, Letitia Hargrave, and Sui Sin Far found themselves on an often heart-wrenching emotional journey.

What is fascinating is that for so many of these women the Canadian landscape was an ever-present and often central character in their accounts. European travellers, including Anna Jameson and Lady Dufferin, and adventurers like Mina Hubbard and Mary Warren, were intrigued and delighted by the majesty and expanse of the land. Marie de l’Incarnation drew fantastic images as she tried to describe to her son the physical and emotional devastation that accompanied an earthquake in New France. What to some was a land of beauty and awe was to others a menacing barrier. Pioneering settlers, whether newly arrived to the continent or moving from one province to another, had to confront and try to vanquish the endless stands of trees or miles of grasslands just to eke out a living. As Loyalist Mary Fisher knew all too well, building a home was backbreaking, never-ending work and the land could be unforgiving. Mary Warren’s delight once she arrived at a mountain meadow contrasts sharply with Maria Adamowska’s bitter disenchantment with the family’s first home in Manitoba. And Emily Murphy’s satirical and humorous depiction of the dreaded mosquito belies the very real concern that Anne Langton’s mother had of being bitten by mosquitoes and blackflies.

To many who appear here — Emily Beavan, Nellie McClung, and Emily Carr, for example — Canada was the promised land. At the same time, the very vastness of the territory was often daunting, particularly for women. Anna Jameson revelled in the feeling of remoteness, of the profound solitude, that added to the sentiment of beauty of the Upper Canadian bush. For Laura Salverson’s Great-Aunt Steinun, that same remoteness meant that medical help for her husband was miles and many hours away. The loneliness of the land was often compounded by the difficulties many settlers had maintaining contact with those at home. Juliana Ewing longed for letters from her mother; and Charlotte Bompas, living an immense distance from civilization, could hardly wait for the great annual mail. One has the sense that a number of the women who inhabit these pages felt a little like intruders on the landscape, and the experience was disquieting.

For many, their response to the land was intimately linked to their reactions to the often harsh climate. Juliana Ewing told her mother that the summer heat at times oppressed her head; Charlotte Bompas noted that the very sharp experience of the extreme cold of a northern winter, and the very short days that accompanied it, was one of her greatest trials. And there is no question that the Fisher and Adamowska families suffered unimaginable hardship during their first winter in Canada. A number of writers went to some length, however, to reassure their readers that, as long as one was prepared, neither the cold nor the heat was as bad as one imagined. Moreover, without snow, the Beavan family would not have been able to move their house on a sled; it was a heavy snowfall that permitted Laura Salverson’s great aunt to even think of pulling her husband to get medical help; and it was the freezing cold that afforded Lady Aberdeen the opportunity to learn to enjoy sledding in Ottawa. In her letter to prospective immigrants from the United States, Mary Ann Shadd, echoing sentiments of other travellers and advice writers of the time, was determined to set the record straight — the weather in the Canada’s was healthy, she stated emphatically.

Another integral and often more daunting part of the landscape was the local inhabitants. Anna Jameson and Mina Hubbard were intrigued when, in their travels, they came across evidence of local native populations, and Maryanne Caswell happily played among abandoned Aboriginal camps and gravesites. And it must be remembered that many women came to Canada because of its aboriginal population. Although Sister Marie Morin often feared it was our dying day when Iroquois raiding parties attacked the settlement in New France, she and other French religieuses knew that the Savages could, with God’s grace, be saved and civilized. Bishop’s wife and helpmeet, Charlotte Bompas, took considerable satisfaction in working with her mission children and was delighted when they began to instruct local Aboriginal women in the scriptures. A number of pioneering women obviously lived in dread of meeting a Canadian Aboriginal, however. They knew, from stories heard at home, that the savages were variously fierce, depraved, inscrutable, dirty, and dangerous — an unknowable other. To some, this land was only fit for Indians and squaws. A young Maria Adamowska froze on the spot and tried to hide when she encountered a small party of elderly Indians. Laura Salverson told of an old charwoman who had a terrifying night when the menace of redskins invaded her little house. That they saved her from an intruder was cause for considerable relief and she (and undoubtedly others) wondered if she had misjudged the wanderers. It was not just First Nations peoples who were seen as foreign. Baroness von Riedesel was quite fascinated by the French Canadian population that she encountered as she made her way to Quebec City and then to her husband’s posting at Sorel. Lady Dufferin described in considerable detail a Mennonite community that she visited in Manitoba. Residents there, she judged, were a wonderful asset to the nation, despite their peculiar tenets. To some, Americans (or as Emily Beavan called them, the Yankees) were even seen as a different kind of people — either as Mary Fisher remembered, hard drinking bad characters, or, as a young Emily Carr discovered, uncomfortable rushers.

That Canada was a new and different land few of the authors here would have disputed. A number were also conscious that encounters with the land could and often did create a new people. Ella Sykes very soon recognized that her English ways were quite different than those of her employer, Mrs. Brown. Life on a western dairy farm also made her aware that Canadians did not share English distinctions of class; in this land full of splendid opportunities, she noted, it was the self-made man or woman who was valued. A young Maryanne Caswell told her grandmother about the visit of a contingent of the North West Mounted Police. They were nice, polite Englishmen, she wrote, and by implication quite different than others in the neighbourhood. Emily Carr was perhaps the most explicit about how the new world could transform settlers. She recounted how her father, after returning home to England, having lived for a time in California, had chaffed at the limitations of the Old world. British Columbia offered him and his new wife a congenial alternative and, there, he quickly became British. Although the gardens around his home were decidedly English, the family also maintained what they called a Canadian field, complete with a snake fence and natural grasses. For her part, Emily was decidedly Canadian, even if this meant that she was slower than her American neighbours. Emily Murphy, too, proudly declared her heritage, writing under her pen name Janey Canuck. Not all welcomed this transformation. Maria Adamowska clung tenaciously to her identity as a Ukrainian, even though she had left the old home at the age of nine. Others longed to become Canadian. As a Chinese-English child in Montreal, Sui Sin Far was aware that she was a stranger. She was an oddity to her school mates and neighbours, and neither the English and the Chinese communities nor her parents really knew quite what to make of her. I cheer myself . . . that I am but a pioneer, she concluded, even if this meant that she had to glory in suffering.

Most did not share Sui Sin Far’s intense sense of alienation. Despite the scattered nature of settlement and Canada’s relatively sparse population that often resulted in terrible loneliness and isolation, new arrivals and settlers could turn to family and their local community for solace and support. And it is here that one is conscious that, despite their differences of experiences and expectations, these women sometimes did share a common understanding of the world and their place within it.

From the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, there is no question that women’s lives were fundamentally shaped by the very nature of the land, with its seasonal and climatic variations. Moreover, many of these authors and the women they wrote about were wives and mothers, and family was the fulcrum of their lives. They were also housekeepers and helpmates and neighbours, and they faced similar situations and dilemmas. Monica Hopkins, with her misadventures with the washing, would have recognized Anne Langton’s difficulties with making bonnets and refashioning her dresses. Maria Adamowska’s memories of being without a piece of bread echo Mary Fisher’s concerns about having sufficient provisions to see the family through their first winter. Both Anne Langton, in the backwoods of Upper Canada, and Ella Sykes, working on the dairy farm in Alberta, ruefully commented that being a rural housekeeper was a life of slavery. And yet, both these women and many others took satisfaction and some pride in their skills and their ability to make do with the limited resources that they had. For those like Juliana Ewing in New Brunswick and Monica Hopkins in Alberta, who seemed to have had to learn how to cook and clean after they arrived in Canada, the novelty of the situation was cause for laughter. For many others, keeping house, looking after children, and attending to a myriad of chores was not even cause for comment. Colonial and Canadian housekeepers knew that many hands made light work — and indeed, they needed the assistance of their children, their husbands (even when, as Monica Hopkins discovered, their husband’s help created more work!) and their neighbours. In their accounts of their own childhood, Maryanne Caswell and seven- or eight-year-old Nellie McClung described helping out in the kitchen and the garden as a natural part of the daily routine. A few women could afford to hire help. But even then, as Ella Sykes commented, the most quick and capable Canadian housekeeper usually found herself in the clutches of the Demon of Work. When family was not enough, households turned to neighbours for help. The Beavan’s house could not have been moved or the Langton’s land cleared without the frolic, or neighbourhood working bee.

Not all women (or men for that matter) were suited to life in Canada. As Mrs. McClung commented about the young couple that the family met on the trail, the land needed women, not a painted doll. Mothers and wives and housekeepers had to have skills, tenacity, and be willing to turn their hand to a multitude of tasks. Many had to cope without the amenities of shops, or what Monica Hopkins called the modern gadgets of the city. They had to assume the responsibility of teacher and farm worker. Women in Canada had to be resilient, like Mary Fisher, who had left everything when she and the family had fled north after the American Revolution, or Susan Allison, who watched her home of many years be taken by the floods and had, without complaint, begun anew. Lydia Campbell, born on a Labrador outpost, remembered that although the family’s closest white neighbours were some 30 miles away, they were never in want. Everyone in the family worked hard; at the same time, we would enjoy ourselves pretty well. Being a wife and mother sometimes meant having to endure the heart-wrenching loss that came with the death of a child or a husband. But a young Margaret Michener and Letitia Hargrave had to carry on — to help neighbours cope with their own catastrophe or to look after other members of their families.

Not all the women who appear in Voices had chosen to come to or settle in Canada. Marie de l’Incarnation, Mère Cécile, Monica Hopkins, and others had consciously decided to make their homes in this new world. Others had followed their husbands. Children arrived with their families. Some, including Ella Sykes’s mistress, were sometimes desperately unhappy. But as wives and mothers, they had a duty to fulfill, and a large part of that was to support their husbands. For many of these women, their faith in God gave them strength and solace. For most of them, their ties to their families — and the support of neighbours and friends — made what could have been an intolerable situation tolerable and, at times, enjoyable.

Single women travellers and visiting wives did not share such anguish. For Baroness von