Audrey Alexandra Brown (1904-1998)

The things you find when dancing about the internet…

I’m adding some missing references to our entries, and came upon a 1934 collection of essays by Martin Burrell that includes a biography of Audrey Alexandra Brown. Our entry for her is not as well fleshed out as it could be, so I know what this afternoon’s task will be…

But I thought you might like to have the whole essay to read, as she is a little known but quite interesting poet from Victoria, back when the Victoria and Islands branch of the Canadian Authors Association was highly active and populated with great talent.

Burrell, Martin. “Audrey Alexandra Brown.” Crumbs are Also Bread (Toronto: Macmillan, 1934): 313-327.

Brown AA – bio in BurrellDownload

Ellen H. Gregsten (1831 – 1923)

I received a request for information about Ellen Gregsten from Christine Campana. Sadly, I was absolutely no help, but she did send the link to the FindaGrave page for the author. There, we are told that

Ellen was one of six children of John Robinson, a printer (from Omagh, County Tyrone Northern Ireland), and Mary Turner or Sarah (Maiden Name Unknown) … an orphan, raised in Liverpool … Ellen married William Gregsten on 29 February 1860 in Liverpool, England, at St. Bride’s church. At the time, William lived there on Clayton Square, and Ellen lived on Falkner Street. Soon after their marriage, some time in 1860, they left England and moved to London, Middlesex County, Ontario, Canada. Although William died there in 1869, Ellen chose to remain in Canada for the rest of her life.

The FindaGrave entry also includes a photo, and a few pages of Gregsten’s chapbook, My Secret: A Story in Rhyme; a second chapbook/pamphlet, My February Wish, has no date.

If anyone has any information about this author, please contact us, and we will pass the information forward to Christine Campana.

Lydia Frances Williamson (“Richard Scrace”)

I love connection to community…

I while ago, Ed Butts, of Guelph, Ontario, sent an email asking if we had a better copy of our photo of Lydia Frances Williamson for an article he was writing. The original is from John W. Garvin, ed. Canadian Poets, 2nd ed. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1926), so it was easy to provide. His article has come out today in the Guelph Today news.

Butts, Ed. “Get to Know Two of Guelph’s Lesser-known Composers and Poets.” Guelph Today (26 April 2021). Web.

Hearing More Voices: English-Canadian Women in Print and on the Air, 1914-1960 (2020), by Carole Gerson and Peggy Kelly, a review by Phyllis Reeve

How dare the 1970s Children’s Literature community reject Anne of Green Gables as a “classic,” because the success of LM Montgomery‘s novels was “viewed as symptomatic of their lack of serious value”?

Like Phyllis Reeve, the reviewer of Carole Gerson and Peggy Kelly’s Hearing More Voices: English-Canadian Women in Print and on the Air, 1914-1960, I was appalled to learn of such an opinion. I’m sure that readers of my generation (interestingly, those who would have encountered Anne in the early 1970s) absolutely considered Anne of Green Gables already to be a classic. Another favourite of the reviewer is children’s author and radio presenter Mary Grannan (“Just Mary”). This is undoubtedly why she opens her review with a foray into her childhood reading, but in addition to children’s authors, Hearing More Voices presents more broadly “aspects of the lives and works of Canadian female writers and broadcasters within a tumultuous period during our socio-economic and political history: 1914-1960.” Like our CEWW project, the authors focus on lesser known writers who are all very well worth reading about.

“In the Land of the Tsar,” by Rosamond Kershaw

Kershaw, Rosamond. “Five Days in the Land of the Tsar.” Canada Monthly 17.4 (February 1915), 222-226; 17.5 (March 1915), 102+

Only three years after this article, despite Tzar Nicholas’s willingness to abdicate, the Russian Imperial family was taken from their home, imprisoned in Aleksandr Palace, then removed to Siberia, where they were shot and bayoneted on the order of Vladimir Lenin on 17 July 1918. The article below notes that St. Petersburg is “now Petrograd,” a sign of the changing times already in Russia.

National Reference Book on Canadian Men and Women, 6th ed. (1940)

I’ve been tidying my shelves at home.

Soooo many wonderful books! YA and children’s literature. Science fiction. Mysteries. Poetry. Biography. Victorian and modern fiction. But the largest set is, not surprisingly, early Canadian literature. (I’ve a couple of Atwood novels, too, but not many…)

It came to my attention that I have one book that is not readily available in libraries and is not online. I bought my copy after SFU culled theirs from their reference section because no one except me had taken it out for 10 years. Still an important reference text, people! So I thought I would put it out there, so that if other scholars are struggling to come by it, I can send the information. It is too long, the binding too broad, and the papers too thin, to scan easily, so I’ll just post the bibliographic details. Hopefully this post will show up in Google searches sufficiently well.

The National Reference Book on Canadian Men and Women. 6th ed. (1940)

If you need an entry from this book, email me and I’ll send you a picture of the pages you need.

 

More about Sui Sin Far

I’ve discovered a new potential friend: Alexandra Abletshauser at the University of Glasgow. I haven’t yet asked her is we could share information with each other, but she did tell me I could repost her guest blog on Transatlantic Literary Women blog, Sui Sin Far and the Making of the Chinese North American Identity, so here it is. Note the description of Alexandra at the end. You can see why our projects need to collaborate…

Alexandra’s research focuses on English- and French-Canadian prose writing from 1880 to 1914. She examines how Canadian women writers use emotions to manipulate readers’ responses to political and social issues, such as women’s suffrage, alcoholism and temperance. Alexandra is also a Hunterian Associate at The Hunterian Museum in Glasgow where she explores the biographies of Native North American artefacts.

“Marget: A New Years Memory,” by Faith Fenton

Fenton, Faith. “Marget: A New Year’s Memory.” Green Holly: Sing Heigh-ho Unto the Green Holly [Stratford, ON? : s.n., 1895?]: 37-41.

This is a rather morose story for a holiday eve, but I suspect the pathos and sentimentality is intended to make us reflect on our lives at this moment of transition into a new year. I hope your evening is far better than this family’s, especially Marget’s. I really wonder what exactly it was that she felt she had to atone for…

 

“Candy Man,” by Evelyn Craig Rusby

Here is the second of the Evelyn Craig Rusby clippings from the Toronto Globe and Mail; this one is on page 14, on Tuesday, 18 May 1954.

“Lines to Mrs. Margaret Dixon McDougall,” by Thomas Higginson

Higginson, Thomas Henry. “Lines to Mrs. Margaret Dixon McDougall.” Poetical Works of Thomas Higginson. Vankleek Hill, ON: A.W.Otto, 1888. 77.

A couple of weeks ago, we were contacted by Nancy Guppy, the great-great-granddaughter of Margaret Dixon McDougall, who had some minor edits to make to our original entry, in the static database at SFU. We had not yet revised the entry for inclusion in the new database, so I took on that task. What a complicated family! But between us we have figured it out, I believe.

In searching for information, I came across this poem by Irish-Canadian poet Thomas Higginson, an encomium to Margaret Dixon McDougall, who by this time had moved to Michigan to live with her parents and her half-brother’s family. She subsequently moved to Washington state, and died on a visit to Seattle in 1899.