• Our project
  • How to use our site
  • Authors lists
    • Authors completed
    • Authors to be included
    • Author “snapshots”
    • Authors to be evaluated
    • Authors using pseudonyms
    • Resource list
    • Authors not included (for researchers)
  • Comprehensive Index of Contributors to the Crucible Magazine, 1932-1943
  • Index of Female Contributors to The Canadian Poetry Magazine, 1936-1950
  • A series of lists
    • Canadian periodicals online at ECO
    • A complete list of Ryerson Poetry Chapbooks, 1925-1962
      • Ryerson Poetry Chapbook 4: The Captive Gypsy (1926), by Constance Davies-Woodrow
      • Ryerson Poetry Chapbook 5: The Ear Trumpet (1926), by Annie Charlotte Dalton
      • Ryerson Poetry Chapbook 77: Songs, Being a Selection of Earlier Sonnets and Lyrics (1937), by Helena Coleman
    • Pseudonyms: Known and unknown
    • Some anonymous texts online at ECO
    • Women of Canada (1930)
  • Resource websites

Canada's Early Women Writers: Authors lists

~ A growing list of Canada's English-language women writers from the beginning to 1950

Canada's Early Women Writers: Authors lists

Monthly Archives: August 2012

“Bliss Carman,” from Faggots for the Fire (1933), by Audrey MacLeod

30 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Another enigma… Audrey MacLeod published Faggots for the Fire with Macmillan in Toronto in 1933. She does not appear in our SFU database, because we can find no biographical information about her. Our yellowing notes have Walkerton, Ontario, as her place of residence in 1933, as well as New York City with no date assigned. She was apparently a speaker at events in New York in 1931 and 1932, but that is all we have. Her poems are under-signed with the following: “Little Church Around the Corner, New York,” “Tempered ‘Neath an Alien Roof, New York City” (which might suggest she was not American), “St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City,” “Ridgewood, N.J., Where Oak Trees Are,” “Grand Central Station, New York City,” “October, New Canaan, Conn.,” “On-the-Hudson, at Harmon,” “Georgian Bay, Canada,” “Round about Storm King Mountain, On-the-Hudson,” “‘Sacre Coeur’, Montmartrê, Paris” [sic], “‘Flower Show’, New York City,” “Park East Hospital, New York City,”  “To Gertrude Wilkes, Havergal College, Toronto,” “From a Pullman Window,” “In England,” “In the Cathedral, At Chartre, in France” [sic], and “British West Indies.”

“Bliss Carman” was written after the author did in fact spend time visiting with Carman at his home (“Sunshine House”) in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he had “spent at least part of every year since 1897” (DCB). MacLeod’s collection was published in 1933; Carman died in in New Canaan in June of 1929, so this meeting of poets would have been earlier, but still towards the end of life for “the bard who was growing old.”

Bliss Carman

The Robot Detective (1932), by Mabel Broughton Billett

22 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Fiction and other arts, Review

≈ 1 Comment

How can one resist a title like The Robot Detective, written in 1932, when robots were so de la mode? Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. [Rossum’s Universal Robots] was first produced in 1921, and translated into English in 1923, introducing the term robot to the English language and spawning a flood of fiction featuring these new, intriguing but threatening machines. By 1932, one would hope that authors had managed to incorporate robots into their fiction in a scientifically meaningful way, and where better to employ the mechanical brainpower of a robotic intelligence than in criminal detection? Mabel Broughton Billett was certainly aware of the concept of robotic technology, but not of the science. Her “robot detective” incorporates punch-card technology and a mechanical analysis machine, but with less than satisfactory results.

Punch-card technology was first used by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, of weaving fame, in France in the very early 1800s, and was a well-known technology by the 1890s. The first mechanical analysis machine, which ultimately became known as “The Difference Engine,” was described by a German scientist, Johann H. von Müller in 1786, but never fully designed. In 1822, British Charles Babbage took up the project, and by the 1860s a number of scientists, both British and German, had produced plans and prototypes of mechanical analytic machines: the precursors of modern-day computers. Thus began the literary interest in “thinking machines,” an interest that Billett obviously was aware of and exploited in The Robot Detective. What is most troubling about her use of robotic technology, though, is that her robot does not actually do anything. Her detective, retired police officer Major Michael Kettlewell, feeds his hand-written biographical cards into the computer, which discusses the case with him; he then runs away and solves the crime. There is no obvious output from the machine that facilitates his investigation. Billett is explicit–repeatedly so–in noting that his “robot detective” is based on “the German ‘Meldwesen’, the great man-hunting Robot of Berlin” (52), which as far as I can determine did not exist. Given the extremely peripheral involvement of the detecting machine in the solution of Billett’s crime, The Robot Detective is, as a science fiction novel, rather a failure. As a detective novel, however, it is a bit stronger.

The story centres around a double murder committed in the peaceful, independent town of Glenlogan in the interior of British Columbia in the early 1930s. Glenlogan has a “tourist park” that houses itinerant workers and travellers, and the most obvious suspect in the crime is an “Aussie who has been sleeping in the tourist park for the last two weeks” (24).  Billett spins her tale well, leaving us aware of whom to suspect, but without ample evidence to convict in our minds until all is revealed in the final scenes. Unlike Agatha Christie, though, Billett’s scenes are not set in a parlour but in the hills of the Nicola Valley and a hidden inlet on Vancouver Island. Herein lies the greatest interest in the novel for me, personally: the landscape.

When the Aussie is first suspected, Major Kettlewell and his mandatory sidekick Sergeant Whitehead discuss the possibilities of the Aussie’s exit from the valley:

“There are only three ways he can get out of the valley.”
“Yes, sir. And if he had taken the Nicola road he would have met the stage … he couldn’t use the lake road at night … And he hasn’t gone through Kamloops by day, nor been seen at any point on the Fraser highway.”
“Have you wired Grand Prairie?”
“Yes, sir. He’s not been there.”
“Princeton?”
“No sign of him in Princeton, sir.”  (25)

I don’t think there is a reference to Princeton, BC, in any other fictional work; imagine the joy of finding your little nothing of a town thus immortalized!  And Princeton is not alone. The novel is cholk full of references to small British Columbia towns–many of which no longer exist–that were part of my (and many others’) youth and heritage. How could I resist being immersed in a novel that took place in the ghost towns of my youth before they were peopled only by ghosts?

Later in the novel, the antagonist gives his cronies the slip and “walking back to Granite Creek with his wife, had flagged the train” to escape with the loot (285).

Granite Creek cabin

A cabin in Granite Creek, 1984

Granite Creek hotel

The Granite Creek Hotel, elegantly curved by age

Granite Creek (which I knew as “Granite City”) is a small settlement about half a mile from the larger but still minuscule settlement of Coalmont, BC (current population about 100). In the 1980s, there were still a few derelict cabins and the wall of a hotel standing. Now there is nothing. But the site is still part of British Columbia mining history; I myself have gold dust from Granite Creek, panned with my father when I was young. In 1932, Granite Creek was a destination that British Columbia readers would have recognized. They would have been able to situate the fictional Glenlogan, 52 miles from Princeton (284) –as far as I can tell, near current-day Merritt–within the real valleys that Billett uses as her setting. Towns like Grand Prairie, Brookmere, Allison, and Dot… are all real communities that few people today recognize. The setting, far more than the plot or the technological elements, makes Billett’s The Robot Detective worth reading and remembering.

The southern interior of British Columbia, 1922. Map courtesy of Murray Hudson; Halls, Tennessee.

“The Bridge,” by Pauline Harvard

20 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Harvard, Pauline. “The Bridge.” Canadian Poetry Magazine 10.2 (Dec. 1946): 17-18.

“The Bridge” was the first poem to win the Donald G. French Memorial Award for Poetry. A number of our authors won this award or placed in the running, but neither the poems nor the titles of the secondary winners were published in the Canadian Poetry Magazine award announcements.

The Bridge

“The Piper,” by Lilian Leveridge

13 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Leveridge, Lilian. “The Piper.” Canadian Poetry Magazine 9.2 (Dec 1945): 14-15.

Beautiful Joe (1893), by Marshall Saunders

07 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Fiction and other arts, Review

≈ Leave a comment

Connecting my love of early Canadian literature with my love of children’s literature, I have been reading through the children’s texts written by some of our authors, with the intent of sharing them—if only superficially—with others. The first such text was The Bells on Finland Street (1950), by Lyn Cook.

Beautiful Joe

Saunders, Margaret Marshall. Beautiful Joe. Philadelphia, PA: Judson, 1893.

In 1892, Margaret Marshall Saunders entered a competition for the Humane Society of New England that requested stories to support their cause. One of the requirements was that the books be set, naturally enough, in New England, so the story that the Nova Scotian author produced is now claimed as both an American (by nature of the setting) and Canadian (by nature of the author’s nationality) children’s classic. Beautiful Joe not only won Saunders the $200 in prize money, but became the first Canadian novel to sell over one million copies. Beautiful Joe (1893) is considered by many to be the North American Black Beauty (1877), the tale of an animal who suffers under the cruelty of humans and is then taken into a more loving, humane household.

One of the most interesting aspects of Beautiful Joe—as a story—is its enduring resonance with its transnational readership. Numerous and diverse editions of the story have been produced in order to sanitize (bowdlerize, in my opinion) the story in order to render it more in keeping with changing sensibilities regarding depictions of cruelty to animals, especially for younger readers. The early editions are most effective

Image from Studio Vignette (http://studiovignette.blogspot.ca/2011/04/margaret-marshall-saunders-beautiful.html)

in revealing the hardships animals suffered at the hands of humans, and fuelled the burgeoning support for Humane Societies in the United States and Canada: not only the SPCA and the RSPCA, but organizations such as the Beautiful Joe Heritage Society, a more modern response to the effectiveness of Saunders’s narrative appeal.

The story itself is predictable, following the episodic structure of Black Beauty and other tales of moral righteousness (Little Women [1868-69] springs also to mind). Like Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe tells his own tale: the life of a dog, from the horse’s mouth, as it were. Beautiful Joe was abused by his owner, Jenkins: his siblings are killed by being dashed against a wall and his mother, traumatized, succumbs to grief. Angered at her death, Joe attacks his master: as a result, his ears and tail are inexpertly and cruelly cropped. Enter the guardian angel in the form of Harry, cousin to the Morris children, who take him in and give him a loving home. The first, horrific chapter of his life is short; the remainder of the book has Beautiful Joe—so-called to make him feel his ugliness less—as a beloved and well-treated pet. The family are adamant—even at times radical—Animal Rights activists, and the episodes Beautiful Joe relates tell other animals’ tales of woe and survival, no longer his own.

If you liked Black Beauty, you will almost certainly like Beautiful Joe, for Saunders strikes an effective balance between animal and human sensibilities. For a myriad of reasons—content, style, publication history, and social context—it deserves its place as a classic of Canadian children’s literature.

“West Coast,” by Anne Margaret Angus

06 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Angus, Anne Margaret. A New Canadian Anthology. Ed. Alan Creighton and Hilda M. Ridley. Toronto: Crucible, 1938. 8.

“The Elves,” by Yetta Bernstein

03 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Fiction and other arts, Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Bernstein, Yetta. “The Elves.” Creative Young Canada: Collection of Verse, Drawings and Musical Compositions by Young Canadians from Seven to Twenty Years of Age. Ed. Aletta E. Marty. Toronto: Dent, 1928. 90.

Yetta Bernstein contributed both poem and drawing to the Toronto Globe‘s “Circle of Young Canada” section, from which the selections in Creative Young Canada are taken. In this case, it seems that the poem is more an adornment to the illustration than the other way around. “Yetta,” as she signed herself, also contributed illustrations to decorate others’ poems in the collection.

The Elves

“How Great is Man!” by Ada Strachan

01 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Strachan, Ada. “How Great is Man!” Hepaticas in Spring. Author, 1935. 16.

Blogroll

  • Female Poets of the First World War

Links to other projects

  • American Verse Project
  • Canada's Early Women Writers at CWRC
  • Canada's Early Women Writers at SFU
  • Canadian Magazines
  • Canadian War Brides of the First World War
  • Canadian Writers Abroad
  • Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory
  • Database of Canada's Early Women Writers
  • Magazines, Travel, and Middle-brow Culture in Canada, 1920-1960
  • Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles
  • Winnifred Eaton Archive
  • Women in Book History, edited by Cait Croker and Kate Ozment

Pages

  • Our project
  • How to use our site
  • Authors lists
    • Authors completed
    • Authors to be included
    • Author “snapshots”
    • Authors to be evaluated
    • Authors using pseudonyms
    • Resource list
    • Authors not included (for researchers)
  • Comprehensive Index of Contributors to the Crucible Magazine, 1932-1943
  • Index of Female Contributors to The Canadian Poetry Magazine, 1936-1950
  • A series of lists
    • Canadian periodicals online at ECO
    • A complete list of Ryerson Poetry Chapbooks, 1925-1962
      • Ryerson Poetry Chapbook 4: The Captive Gypsy (1926), by Constance Davies-Woodrow
      • Ryerson Poetry Chapbook 5: The Ear Trumpet (1926), by Annie Charlotte Dalton
      • Ryerson Poetry Chapbook 77: Songs, Being a Selection of Earlier Sonnets and Lyrics (1937), by Helena Coleman
    • Pseudonyms: Known and unknown
    • Some anonymous texts online at ECO
    • Women of Canada (1930)
  • Resource websites

Posts and poems

  • December 2022
  • September 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • September 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • July 2011
  • April 2011

Visitors

  • 148,931 hits

Canada\’s Early Women Poets

RSS Feed RSS - Posts

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 730 other subscribers

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Canada's Early Women Writers: Authors lists
    • Join 248 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Canada's Early Women Writers: Authors lists
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...