• 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: May 2018

CEWW and DoCEWW launch, May 25th, 2018

25 Friday May 2018

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in CEWW news

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It is with great joy that we are able to announce that as of today, May 25th, 2018, we are up and live!

Canada’s Early Women Writers (CEWW)

The Canada’s Early Women Writers project at the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory is now populated with the biographies and bibliographies of 730 female authors. Novelists, poets, journalists, scientists: our authors write in a number of genres, come from a multitude of social spaces and ethnicities, and have published in forums ranging from local newspapers to internationally recognized journals, from small family-owned presses to major players in the publication world.

The stories of these women, and of our delving into their histories, are fascinating. I have posted in the past about our research adventures, such as the discovery of Isa Grindlay Jackson’s peregrinations; or the mystery of nurse Jane Layhew, who married Northrop Frye’s cousin; or the rather convoluted history of Margaret Vance Rody’s one book of poetry, Gleanings (1925, 1931, 1942). The stories are myriad, and it is our privilege to share them with you all.

The Database of Canada’s Early Women Writers (DoCEWW)

At the outset of the project, our task was to find as many early Canadian women authors as possible, after which we would try to fill in the details for as many as we could. We were astonished to discover over 4800 Canadian women who published their first works in or before 1950.

We knew, though, that we would not be able to find biographical details for all 4800 authors, although bibliographical data was more likely to be comprehensive. In order not to lose what information we had amassed, with the assistance of the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at the Simon Fraser University Library, we created a more extensive and yet simpler database: DoCEWW.

Where CEWW offers extensive bio-bibliographic entries, DoCEWW records each author’s name, alternative names, dates and places of birth and death, residences, titles written, and collections and periodicals contributed to.

While DoCEWW already contains some 4800 authors, the list is not yet comprehensive, so if you know of any other authors to include, or have information to add or corrections to make, please contact us! Neither of our projects would be half as rich without the help of the online community.

 

So thank you all!

Our heartfelt thanks go out to all of the relatives, and friends, and academics who have shared their knowledge and research and family stories with us. This is what our project is all about: sharing stories and information and making sure the women who helped build Canada’s literary world are not forgotten.

Here is the list of some of the wonderful people who have assisted us; if you should be on here and are not, please contact me so I can rectify the omission.

A. Elizabeth McKim
A.M.D. McWilliam
Ajai Khattri
Alan Kultschar
Anita Birt
Annette Fulford
Arthur W.F. Barrett
Ashley Armsworthy
Beatrice Rowley
Beverlee (Croft) Nelson
Bill Wills
Brenda Hattie
Brian Busby
Bruce Gordon
Cairine Macdonald
Callie Stacey
Carol Fraser
Carolyn Brown
Cathy Rowley
Charles Rowley
Chris Boggs
Christine Kilpatrick
Christine Owen
Coral Ann Howells
Daniel Madden
Daphne Biggs
David Mawhinney
David Reed
Debra Martens
Dennis Brooks
Diana Birchall
Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum
Dresdin L. Archibald
Eileen Santlal
Eleanor Best
Elizabeth Donaldson
Eric Pedersen
Eva-Marie Kroller
Evelyn Bromley
Geir Jaegersen
Geneviève Bruneau
Glenn Belyea
Helen Elizabeth Ross
Helen L. Whyte
Helen Piddington
Helena M. MacLean
Holly Jonson
Jan Gregory
Janice Dowson
Janice Hamilton
Janice Kelly Brown
Jean McCollum
Jim Arnett
John Grove
John Tepper Marlin
Jon Palmer Broderick
Judy Schuett
Karen E.H. Skinazi
Kathy Le Gresley
Kaye Soulsby
Kitt Maitland
Lester Batten
Linda and Bill Jones
Linda Pellerin Cass-Jones
Lindsay Carroll
Liz Tracy Hartzler
Lyn and Debra Cook
Lyn Nunn
Margaret Buffie
Margaret Sweatman
Mark Donaldson
Marte Brengle
Mary Chapman
Mary Joanne Peace Henderson
Michael Edward Bath
Nevin Taggart
Nick Drumbolis
Nora Spence
Pam McCorquodale
Patricia McDonald
Paul Ross
Paula Niall
Ray Saintonge
Ron Robichaud
Samantha Philo-Gill
Sheldon Rose
Simon Pole
Stephen Cox
Steve Willerton (and his father Victor)
Vivian Moreau
William Sivell

CWRC blogs and CEWW stories

23 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Biography, Fiction and other arts

≈ 3 Comments

Way back before the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory was live, they maintained a WordPress.org site, where we posted a number of blogs, our “Adventures in Research.” Trying today to link to one of those blog posts, I discovered to my horror that they had not been ported over to the active CWRC project website. But all was not lost: I of course have copies of the content on my hard-drive, so I will repost our stories here for you all. The first describes the convoluted path to the discovery of nurse Jane Layhew, of Prince George, BC, also the author of Rx for Murder (1946), as well as the cousin-in-law of Northrop Frye… Here’s the original post:

10 September 2015: Adventures in Research Opus 5

Jane Layhew Rediscovered

A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Coral Ann Howells (University of Reading) wrote asking for information about one of the authors on our long-list: Jane Layhew. All we had was that “Mrs. Jane Layhew” had written a novel, Rx for Murder that is mentioned in David Skene-Melvin’s bibliography of Canadian Crime Fiction. Not much to go on, but Dr. Howells had provided us some clues. She notes that “Bill New discovered that UNBC offers a Jane Layhew Nursing Bursary,” and that “JL graduated as a Registered Nurse from Prince Rupert’s District Hospital in 1935 and then worked for 35 years at Prince George Regional Hospital—’well respected by her peers and fondly remembered’.” The information on the UNBC website is sparse to say the least, and, as Dr. Howell’s points out, there is—not surprisingly—“no mention of her crime novel (if that is the same Jane Layhew).”

That was the fundamental question in the enquiry: is Jane Layhew the Prince George nurse the same Jane Layhew touted as “Montreal’s new mystery writer” in the 1947 advertisement in the Montreal Standard (also located by Dr. New)? And if so, what are her actual birth and death dates? Always keen on a research mystery, I set off. Let’s see if I can recreate the chain of events…

About the author

First stop, of course, was Ancestry.ca, where we discovered that a Lew Wallace Layhew was married to Jane Layhew. Lew was the twin brother of Hew Layhew (what a nasty thing to do to one’s sons!). Hew seemed to have been a good friend of Northrup Frye and Helen Kemp, as the name crops up in their letters, and Lew’s 1938 marriage is mentioned there (Denham 333). It turns out the association is much closer than friendship: Northrop Frye’s mother, Catherine Howard, was the older sister of Lew and Hew’s mother, Harriet, called “Aunt Hattie” in the letters. This familial connection suggests that this Lew’s Jane would have been, if only peripherally, a part of the Canadian literary and publishing world. Lew and Jane Layhew did live in Prince George in the second half of the 20th century, although I don’t have them there earlier than 1953. Further delving discovered that a Jane Thompson Potts, aged 25, married Lew Wallace Layhew in Alert Bay on 19 October 1938. So now we needed to tie Jane Potts Layhew of Alert Bay, then Prince George, to Jane Layhew the Montreal author.

Copyright for Rx for Murder was registered in Canada on 24 July 1946 and the book was reviewed in August 1946 in the Montreal Gazette and in Feb 1947 in the Ottawa Citizen. The book itself is held by the University of Toronto and UBC libraries; library copies, however, have no dust-jackets, but a copy for sale on ABEbooks did… A delightful bookshop owner in Oregon scanned in the dust-jacket flap with Jane Layhew’s picture and short bio, and I began to piece together more of the story of Jane’s life.

The dust-jacket notes that Jane was born in Vancouver, and lived in the Maritimes while her father was active in WWI. After the war they returned to a “small village near an Indian reservation” in BC. It also notes that she had 2 years at UBC, and 5 years as a nurse. The dust-jacket also notes (in 1946) that “Mrs. Layhew is now a resident of Montreal.” W.J. Hurlow, reviewer for the Ottawa Citizen repeats the information from the dust-jacket, but explicitly identifies the “small village” as “an island named Alert Bay.” (The island is actually Cormorant Island; Alert Bay is the community thereon.) D.S.S. Mackenzie, of the Montreal Gazette, proclaims that as a “Vancouver-born, Maritimes-bred, Montreal-resident,” Mrs. Layhew has “special claims to attention,” “drawing on her experience as a nurse and a Vancouverite” to lend authenticity to her story. We can be certain, then, that the nurse from Prince George, Jane Layhew née Potts, is the author of Rx for Murder. Ancestry.ca fills in the details:

Jane Potts was born in Vancouver, and her father did serve in WWI, returning to BC (specifically Alert Bay, where he was a customs officer in 1921). In 1949, a Jane Layhew was in Vancouver sans husband (is it possible he had been in the military and not yet demobbed?). In 1953 and afterwards, Jane and Lew Layhew were living in Prince George. The living-in-Montreal-in-1946 part of the story could have been because of WWII, just as living with her parents in Maritimes (actually, Oak Hill Farm, Nine Mile River, NS), was a response to her father being overseas for WWI.

About the book

The book is set explicitly in a hospital in Vancouver (26), although the hospital in question is Hamilton General Hospital, and driver of the car in the opening scenes lives on Belgrave Street (20). Now, there is a Belgrave Avenue in North Vancouver, but certainly no Hamilton Hospital in Vancouver; neither is there a Claremont nor a Lancaster Hotel. Still, the setting is Vancouver, despite that at least two other sets of researchers (Cooke and Morton, and Sloniowski and Rose, one doubtless referencing the other) say the novel is by Janet Layhew and set in Montreal.

The plot is unnecessarily complex; or rather, the explanation of the plot is unnecessarily confusing. The plot itself is fairly simple: a woman is struck by a car and wants her daughter—who has disappeared—found; the daughter turns up locked in a room with a dead man in outside the door; two importers of exotic items from the Orient and Mexico have separated the women, telling each that the other will be killed if they tell the authorities what they know. We are not told what they know, but to the modern reader it is obvious that the importers are dealing in drugs. Complications involving taxi drivers, a doctor at the hospital, and our heroine nurse’s ex-roommate ensue, and culminate in an explicable, but I must admit unexpected arrest. That the ending is not predictable is more due to a lack of solid evidence provided to the reader than to any artful construction on the part of the author. One of the highlights of the book was the language: mulct, matutinal, ingurgitate, lupine (adj)… and of course 1940s slang in joyful abundance.

What is most disturbing lies not in the book itself, which has no reference whatsoever to Native Canadians or communities, is the comment on the dust-jacket, taken and disseminated thoughtlessly. The dust-jacket calls the Alert Bay Native community “only two generations removed from the days of scalping parties—which [it notes] may account for [the author’s] morbid interest in murder.” Hurlow of the Ottawa Citizen further distorts this representation of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation, erroneously attributing the final comment to the author herself: “According to Mrs. Layhew, her interest in morbid events and even murder may have stemmed from the influence of primitive and lawless neighbours.” The gratuitous inclusion of such comments both in the review and—worse—on the dust-jacket trouble my modern sensibilities, and really bring home how little respect or even understanding of Native cultures was current in the 1940s. The only rationale I have is that such sensationalizing of the author’s life was surely intended to boost sales. That such a tactic would work, for a novel that has absolutely no mention of anything Native, really does speak to how far we have come, regardless of how far we may have yet to go.

While Kirkus Reviews described the novel as “effervescent,” I have to say that I found it—while fascinating for a number of reasons—rather convoluted of plot and shallow of characterization. The novel appears to have been successful enough to have been serialized in The Montreal Standard; at any rate, “Prescription for Murder—fiction by Mrs. Jane Layhew” appears in the contents for 22 March 1947. The Saturday Review found it “adequate,” which is more in keeping with its rightful position on the detective fiction ladder of success: it did fade from view as a novel, much as Jane Layhew did as an author: as far as we can tell, this was her only foray into the literary world.

Works cited

“The Criminal Record: The Saturday Review‘s Guide to Detective Fiction.” Rev. of Rx for Murder. By Jane Layhew. Saturday Review 22 Sept. 1946: 41.

Cooke, Nathalie, and Susanne Morton. Introduction. Psyche. By Phyllis Brett Young. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2008.

Denham, Robert D., ed. The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939, Volume 2: 1936-1939. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996.

Hurlow, W.J. “On the Book Table.” Rev. of Rx for Murder. By Jane Layhew. Ottawa Citizen 8 Feb. 1947.

Layhew, Jane. Rx for Murder. New York: Lippincott, 1946.

MacKenzie, D.S.S. “Blood and Thunder.” Rev. of Rx for Murder. By Jane Layhew. Montreal Gazette 30 Aug. 1946: 7.

Skene-Melvin, David. Canadian Crime Fiction. Shelburne, ON: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 1997.

Sloniowski, Jeannette, and Marilyn J. Rose. Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Television, and Film. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014. 36.

 

Victoria Day 2018

22 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Yesterday we had our statutory day off ostensibly to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday. Note that in Britain, this is the Spring Bank Holiday; in Canada, though, it is still the “Victoria Day Weekend.” Victoria’s actually birthday is May 24th, of course, as those of you who call it the “May 24th Weekend” undoubtedly know. Regardless, it is the perfect time for a spring holiday, and everyone here, at least, took advantage of the sunshine and warmth after a nasty winter.

Once again, our friend Brian Busby over at The Dusty Bookcase has posted an apropos poem by one of our authors, “Queen Victoria,” by Jean Blewett.

 

 

“Homesick,” by Wynn Rutty

20 Sunday May 2018

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Rutty. Wynn. “Homesick.” Easter Poem Competition, Kingston Gleaner (14 May 1927): 2.

Wynne (or Wynn) Rutty was a member of the Canadian Authors Association, and hosted a radio program on CHML, “The Wynn Rutty Show.” In addition to her extensive bibliography of titles, she had two plays produced in 1938 in Hamilton, Ontario: Errors and Omissions (Attic Theatre) and Merry-Go-Round: A Play in Three Acts (Players’ Guild Competition).

“The Prelude,” by Gertrude MacGregor Moffat

16 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Poetry

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Moffat, Gertrude MacGregor. “The Prelude.” A Book of Verse (Toronto: Macmillan, 1924): 8.

Children’s author Lyn Cook turns 100

07 Monday May 2018

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Biography, CEWW news

≈ 8 Comments

A few days ago, on 4 May 2018, Canadian children’s author Lyn Cook turned 100, the second of our authors to do so during the course of our project’s development.

I spoke to Lyn a few years ago—I believe she was 96 at the time—and she was a sharp, engaging woman, whose acumen belied her advancing age. It pleases me greatly that she is still with us, especially as her daughter, Deborah, with whom I was in contact, died recently of cancer. At the time, Lyn promised to send me copies of her poetry chapbooks—she self-published three in the 1940s under the pseudonym Margaret Culverhouse, a combination of her second name with her maternal grandmother’s maiden name—but sadly Deborah was unable to find them (“I know I have extra copies somewhere…”).

Lyn Cook was an extremely popular children’s author in the 1950s and 60s. Her first book, The Bells on Finland Street (1950) was based on her experiences as a young mother in Sudbury, Ontario, where the population included a mixture of various Scandinavian and other European cultures. The Bells on Finland Street was followed by 20 other books for children, as well as a Girl Guide Brownie handbook and a study guide for her most successful novel, Samantha’s Secret Room (1963).

Here is an announcement of Lyn’s 100th birthday, published yesterday (5 May 2018) in the Toronto Globe & Mail. A more complete biography is posted in the Canada’s Early Women Writers project at the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory.

 

Swinging in the spring fresh air

04 Friday May 2018

Posted by Karyn Huenemann in Fiction and other arts

≈ Leave a comment

Aletta E. Marty’s Creative Young Canada: Collection of Verse, Drawings and Musical Compositions by Young Canadians from Seven to Twenty Years of Age—(foreward by “Agnes Delamoure” (Nancy Durham), Toronto: Dent, 1928.)—is comprised of both poetry and illustrations by Canada’s young talent. Here is an illustration by “Mélisse” (Melissa Chalmers Barrowman) that reminds me of my own childhood swinging in the spring sunshine. I wonder if she ever got as high as the cross-bar?

 

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

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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
    • Pseudonyms: Known and unknown
    • Some anonymous texts online at ECO
    • Women of Canada (1930)
  • Resource websites

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