“The Dead Street,” by J. Try-Davies; or, The Vagaries of Attribution

It is perhaps cheeky of me to publish this poem on our website, as it is in fact by a male author: Captain John Try-Davies (1830-1911) of Montreal. But there is a rationale here and a mystery to explore; maybe someone out in the Canadian literary world has come up with more answers that what we have.

If you look up “Sophia Almon Hensley” in many pre-internet catalogues of early Canadian literature, you will notice three texts attributed to her under the name of J. Try-Davies. Carole Gerson and Carol McIver* note that this all began (as far as they can tell, and they have looked) with Who’s Who in America, which attributed the novel Love & Co. (Limited) (New York: Selwin Tait, 1901)—signed by “J. Try Davies and Mary Woolston”—to Hensley. It was first published by Brown of Montreal in 1897 as by “John Wernberny and Another,” which does nothing to clarify the situation. It’s authorship nonetheless firmly established by Who’s Who, other catalogues and critics proceeded to attribute other works by J. Try-Davies to Hensley as well, adding “J. Try-Davies” as well as “John Wernberny” to the list of Hensley’s pseudonyms. She did have others. So we see Love & Co. (Limited), Historical Sketch of Boisbriant ([1899]), and A Semi-Detached House and Other Stories (1900) appearing consistently in her list of publications.

Are “Another” and “Mary Woolston” actually Sophia Almon Hensley (as Gerson and McIver suggest, and seems highly possible)? If not, what else is going on? When going through Carole’s paper file on J. Try-Davies from the mid-1980s, trying to answer this question, I came across a typescript of a poem he wrote for the Montreal Pen and Pencil Club, and I couldn’t resist. So here is “The Dead Street,” by Captain John Try-Davies, distinctly not Sophia Almon Hensley.

I leave evaluation of its quality to you.

The Dead Street

By the blue sea in Pompeii
Lies a dead Street
That held gay life ‘neath the blue sky
And fluttered with the pattering of many feet:

We shivered as the brass bound wheels
Bearing on high some lady sweet
Or fare of gods from outland keels
Trundled the deep worn ruts along;
Or echoed laugh of girl or shipman’s song.
So lived the Street.

Now on chill stones and silent walls
No echo of a footstep falls
But the scored flag-stones tell the story
How it once lived when Rome was in her glory.

* Gerson, Carole, and Carol McIver. “Captain Try-Davies and Sophia Almon Hensley.” Canadian Notes & Queries 39 (1988): 10-11.

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“A Request,” by L.M. Montgomery

Montgomery, L.M. “A Request.” Canadian Magazine 45.4 (August 1915): 324.

This post is not actually about L.M. Montgomery, who everybody knows, or at least has no reason not to know. This post is about Margaret Bell Saunders. Again, not Margaret Marshall Saunders, author of Beautiful Joe: An Autobiography (1893), which is also on the “you should already know about this” CanLit list.

Margaret Bell Saunders, on the other hand, is troublesomely elusive. I was reviewing the entry we have almost finished, and discovered that we have no solid birth or death dates, nor anything about her parents or siblings, spouse, or children—if she had any. And as she is known as both Miss Margaret Bell Saunders and Mrs. Margaret Bell Saunders, is it possible that she was Mrs. Margaret Saunders, née Bell? This contemplation is supported by the fact that she published as Margaret Bell, not Margaret Bell Saunders… but the greater portion of evidence suggests that she remained unmarried.

What do we know, then? She is known, as much as she is known at all, as a war correspondent during the First World War. The US Library of Congress has a collection of photographs of her from 1920 (including this delightful shot of her with her dog), and note that “Miss Saunders served with the British Army and was for two years under fire. She was the first English Speaking Woman to be wounded in the War.”

An article by Margaret Bell—”Women and Art in Canada (Everywoman’s World, 1914)—is oft referenced in discussions of Canadian women artists; that is about all I had to go on. A search on Early Canadiana Online, though, reveals that before the First World War, as early as 1911, she was writing a regular column in the Canadian Courier—”The Matinee Girl”—as well as publishing articles and stories in the Canadian Magazine. So the tentative birthday we had, 1894, seems unlikely. Ancestry.ca is of surprisingly little help: Margaret, Bell, and Saunders all being just that bit too much like Smith or Jones.

So that leaves me still missing a significant amount of biographical information in our entry on Margaret Bell Saunders. Early Canadiana Online was a good place to go, for it not only expanded our knowledge that little bit, but also gave us this poem by L.M. Montgomery, that follows an article by Margaret Bell in the Canadian Courier, and is where this post began…

 

 

Early Canadian women writers in the news

Today is a bit of a banner day for news of early Canadian women writers. First, Brian Busby, who publishes The Dusty Bookcase literary blog, has reviewed Irene Baird‘s 1937 novel, John.

Then I discovered that in The Vancouver Sun, in honour of Canada’s sesquicentenary, journalist Stephen Hume is “counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.”

This series appears to have begun on 13 January with hockey player Joe Sakic. 14 January gave us Dr. David Suzuki; 15 January was a Sunday; and on 16 January Hume wrote about one of our authors: teacher–journalist–author Agnes Deans Cameron.

In 1908, Agnes Deans Cameron and her Jessie Cameron Brown travelled through the “Belt of Wheat” and the “Belt of Fur” to become the first white women—not woman—to reach the Arctic Ocean overland. Agnes’s published account of the journey—The New North: Being Some Account of a Woman’s Journey Through Canada to the Arctic—contains a remarkable 120 images. While some of these are standard portraits of historically important men, most of them detail the women’s adventures travelling from Chicago overland through Winnipeg, Regina, and Edmonton to Athabasca Landing; up the Athabasca, Slave, and MacKenzie Rivers to the Arctic Ocean at Fort McPherson and the delta of the MacKenzie; and back again by a similar although not identical route.
Here are a few of my favourite images from the book; the complete text is available through the Internet Archive.

page 15

page 282

page 347

A poem by Rosanna Leprohon for January 14th

Leprohon, Rosanna. [Entry for January 14]. Canadian Birthday Book. Ed. Seranus [Susan Frances Harrison]. Toronto: Robinson, 1887.

“Men Working,” by Florence Ralston Werum

Werum, Florence Ralston. “Men Working.” The Bridge Men’s Magazine 34.11 (November 1934).

Despite her residence in Ohio, Florence Ralston Werum is included in our project by virtue of having been born and raised in Canada. Her membership in the Canadian Authors Association speaks to a continued self-identification as Canadian.

I have been searching through our records, and WorldCat, and the Internet Archive, and I have not yet managed to find further reference to a book Florence Ralston Werum is said to have written: the 1932 edition of The History of the Columbus Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution. That being said, neither have I found references to the four volumes listed in her entry in Who’s Who in Illinois (1947), either: Sea Fancies (1930)—a brochure; Women in Literature (1936); The Troubadour (1930); and “Neptunian Nights” (which we suspect is a single poem, not a book). I did, however, come across this poem in an unexpected place: The Bridge Men’s Magazine, the official publication of the International Association of Bridge, Structural, and Ornamental Iron Workers.

“The World We Live In, ” by Martha Martin

Martin, Martha. “The World We Live In.” Toronto Globe and Mail (3 September 1948).