• 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: March 2017

Hetty Dorval (1947), by Ethel Wilson

26 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Fiction and other arts, Review

≈ 2 Comments

Wilson, Ethel. Hetty Dorval. New York: Harper, 1925.

On our blog, I post poems by the women writers in our project, many of whom readers have never run across before. I also post reviews of books that are relatively if not completely unknown. Today, though, I am writing about the first novel, Hetty Dorval (1947), by a more well-known Canadian author, Ethel Wilson. My story is as follows…

I have a friend, Brenda, who—in the way of all good friends—passes on to me the books she loves. She, similarly, has a friend Lorie who does the same. A few weeks ago, Brenda came to me with Lorie’s latest, thinking three things: 1) this author was likely on our list; 2) the novel’s setting of Lytton, BC, spoke to us all; and 3) it was a beautifully crafted, fascinating novel. She is right on all three points.

Ethel Wilson (1888-1980) was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and by all accounts shared a close relationship with her father, who had moved her back to England when her mother died giving birth when Ethel was only a year and a half. When Ethel was nine, her father died and she was shipped out to her maternal grandmother in Vancouver. After a stint in a Methodist boarding school in England, Ethel returned to Vancouver and studied to be a teacher, teaching elementary school until 1921, when she married Dr. Wallace Wilson (1888-1966). According to David Stouck in Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography (University of Toronto Press, 2003), the couple spent a belated honeymoon travelling through the interior of British Columbia and “most likely stopped the first night at a hotel in the town of Lytton.

This is where the two great rivers, the Thompson and the Fraser, converge, and where the blue and white Thompson is swallowed up and disappears into the swollen and muddy Fraser. For Ethel Wilson it was a powerful, perhaps frightening, sight and would occupy her imagination for years until it finally emerged in her fiction. (68)

Image from the Wikipedia entry on the Thompson River
Brenda and Lorie and I, discussing the novel on an evening arranged specifically this purpose, knew that Ethel Wilson must have spent some time in Lytton, for the description of the confluence of the Thompson and the Fraser was breathtakingly accurate. We didn’t know her history in the Thompson-Nicola, but I knew whom to ask… An email to Scotland later, and I was sent quotations and information from David Stouck’s biography by Dr. Faye Hammill at the University of Strathclyde, who has worked on Wilson in the past. (I’d just like to state at this juncture that I did not, in fact, research or write our SFU entry on Wilson, as is likely obvious.)

Wilson writes of the British Columbia interior from the heart of someone who knows and loves it, but also recognizes the power of the rivers and the harshness of the dry, hot landscape. For a reader who grew up in the locale (well, the Similkameen rather than the Thompson-Nicola, but sharing a geography), the opening lines brought back a childhood with summer days spent lying in the shallows of a river to escape the scorching heat:

The day that Mrs. Dorval’s furniture arrived in Lytton, Ernestine and I had gone to the station to see the train come in. It was a hot day. The heat of the sun burned down from above, it beat up from the ground and was reflected from the hot hills. (1)

From the perspective of a child, too, we meet Hester (“Hetty”) Dorval, who captivates the young Frances (“Frankie”) Burnaby with her secrets and disingenuous affection. Frankie is conflicted at Hetty’s extorting a promise not to mention their acquaintance, and even more conflicted when she gleans from her parents a more adult understanding of the enigmatic Hetty’s history. “It was hard to tell,” she notes later, “how much of Hetty was artful and how much was artless” (52).

As Frankie grows, and grows in knowledge of Hetty, whose life touches her life at random but essential moments, Frankie’s perspective and voice both transition smoothly from that of an innocent child to a naïve adolescent to a woman with an adult understanding of Hetty’s irredeemably flawed personality. We feel that we grow with Frankie through her transitions, as she sorts through her experiences, learning slowly to parse reality from artifice as she matures. We are caught with Frankie in not knowing what to do, what will happen, and in accepting the painful results of circumstances beyond her control, or errors in judgment made as a result of her youthful inexperience.

“But,” says Frankie, “this is not a story of me … but of the places and ways known to me in which Hetty Dorval has appeared. It is not even Hetty Dorval’s whole story because to this day I do not know Hetty’s whole story and she does not tell. I only knew the story of Hetty by inference and strange chance.” (57)

We see through Frankie’s eyes; we watch her infer and discern and synthesize and finally comprehend. In the end, we feel a sympathy with Frankie in the pain of her understanding. It is fitting that Hetty passes from Frankie’s life somewhat as she came in: in mystery. But her leaving is only a mystery of circumstance and history, coming as it does at the outbreak of war. The final lines encapsulate Frankie’s experience of Hetty, leaving us with a feeling of sorrow and inevitability:

Six weeks later the German army occupied Vienna. There arose a wall of silence around the city, through which only faint confused sounds were sometimes heard. (92)

more

May Judge, in the Vancouver Poetry Society Book of Days (1947)

19 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Biography, Fiction and other arts, Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

The Vancouver Poetry Society, 1916-1949: A Book of Days. Ed. Vancouver Poetry Society (Toronto: Ryerson, 1946).

In compiling the folder of data for May Perceval Judge, whose entry we have just finished, I was reminded of the Vancouver Poetry Society’s Book of Days, which contains smatterings of poetry, stories, biographies, and executive lists from the Vancouver Poetry Society in 1946-47.

I am not sure who actually wrote this anecdote, but it gives us a fair idea of the sort of community the Vancouver poets of the early twentieth century enjoyed. This story is from October 1918: in the spring of that year, Isabel Ecclestone MacKay read her poetry as a guest speaker, AM Stephens gave a series of lectures on Greek literature, and AM Pound was elected archivist of the society. In 1947, when this little volume was published, Lorne Pierce was the Honorary President, Ernest Fewster was President, and Mildred Valley Thornton was First-Vice President. Illustrious names abounded.

“The Mountains,” by Dallas Banister

13 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Banister, Dallas. “The Mountains.” Lethbridge Herald (16 September 1941): 8.

Dallas Banister Wright (Mrs. William Alberta Wright) is a bit elusive. All we initially knew was that she published a book of poetry, Out of the Mist, in 1980. Based on that date, she didn’t really belong in our project; but as she was born in 1908 and died in 1989, it seemed possible that she did publish something before 1950. So I did a bit of poking around and discovered that she published at least this short poem in the Lethbridge Herald in 1941.

Now, Lethbridge isn’t a teeming metropolis, so the likelihood is that Dallas Banister lived somewhere in southern Alberta. I found her name on the website for the Stockman’s Memorial Foundation, in Cochrane, AB. Then I discovered her in a Bibliography of the Blackfoot, by Hugh Aylmer Dempsey and Lindsay Moir. Curiouser and curiouser. But I am smack in the middle of other work at the moment and must move on…. If anyone knows more about this intriguing poet, can you please let me know? I will set one of our busy and brilliant research assistants on the task soon, but for the moment I remain perplexed.

Canada 150: Mary Ellen Smith

08 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Biography, Fiction and other arts

≈ Leave a comment

I just made my first Wikipedia edit!

Vancouver Sun columnist Stephen Hume’s profile of “notable British Columbians” for today is politician Mary Ellen Smith. At the end of his article, he notes that “the federal government designated her a person of national historical significance in 2016.” But wait, I said: we already had her listed with that designation, and I gleaned names from the government list in 2014. Discrepancy! Data failure! Turns out that the Wikipedia list (let this be a lesson to you all) was not correct. When I first checked it, I did verify my data against the government websites listed as references, but those links are now broken. I cannot find a definitive, authoritative list online. Stephen Hume’s data is correct, as made evident by this announcement in November 2016. So I changed the Wikipedia entry, linking to this announcement. But what about all those other dates, now that the actual government list is gone? I think I may have to write an actual letter to someone at Parks Canada, the organization that assigns these designations.

Data concerns aside, I find Mary Ellen Smith’s biography here rather interesting, as it parallels so strongly that of Emily Murphy, Albertan politician and one of the Famous Five, who became the first female police magistrate in the British Empire. Like Mary Ellen Smith, Murphy fought for—and won—numerous improvements in the social and political lives of Canadian women. Like Mary Ellen Smith, too, Emily Murphy was prejudiced against the Asian population of Canada as well as an adherent of eugenicist ideologies. Could it be (and here I really am guessing, not being a political historian) that one of the reasons these women were politically successful was that they agreed with (catered to?) factions in their society that many of us find incomprehensible or abhorrent, but were accepted more readily 100 years ago? Perhaps this is something—more profound than I am able to articulate—to be contemplated in light of the current political atmosphere, on this, International Women’s Day 2017.

 

A poem by Mary Anne McIver for March 6

06 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

McIver, Marry Anne. [Entry for March 6]. Canadian Birthday Book. Ed. Seranus [Susan Frances Harrison]. Toronto: Robinson, 1887.

mciver-mar-6

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  • 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
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