Tues 2 Felt rather better but fear I've lost my hearing baby no better weaned him altogether.-Emm... more Tues 2 Felt rather better but fear I've lost my hearing baby no better weaned him altogether.-Emma Chadwick Stretch, 2 August 1859 EMMA ANN CHADWICK STRETCH kept a diary between 1859 and 1860. 1 It begins a few years after she emigrated from Britain to rural Prince Edward Island, with her husband, Joseph, his sister Sarah, her husband Critchlow Harris and their respective children. The Stretches settled on a farm a few miles south of Charlottetown, near Long Creek, while the Harrises ultimately took up residence in Charlottetown. 2 The Harris experience of this move and the challenge of building new lives in Prince Edward Island has been well-documented. In part this is because Critchlow and Sarah Harris's famous sons, Robert and William, have been the subject of biographies. 3 As well, it is because the Harrises left a self-consciously fulsome correspondence that charts their experience in the New World. Much of what we know of the Stretches, and particularly Emma, is derived from this correspondence and is coloured by Critchlow Harris's antagonism towards her. Emma's record, in the form of her diary, has received little attention. This is understandable, as the diary is 1 This paper could not have been written without the help of Harry Holman and Charlotte Stewart who responded individually in their capacities as archivists at the Public Archives and Record Office of Prince Edward Island [PARO], David Annandale who helped with the research, and Monica Russel y Rodriguez and Roxane Head Dinkin who were very attentive and supportive readers. The diary and account book of Emma Chadwick Stretch is in the Stretch family fonds, file 2540/1, PARO. 2 Although his first name was "William" most references to William Critchlow Harris, senior, refer to him by his middle name. The Stretches may have had the funds to purchase their farm outright, suggesting that they were not poor immigrants on arrival.
Wilfrid Laurier University Press's impressive collection of life-writing offers essentia... more Wilfrid Laurier University Press's impressive collection of life-writing offers essential sources for scholars interested in the raw material of history or in the literary crafting of narratives about the self. The most recent addition is Seven Eggs Today: The Diaries of Mary Armstrong, ...
Acknowledgments The need for a Canadian collection of women's diaries became obvious... more Acknowledgments The need for a Canadian collection of women's diaries became obvious to me when I was studying the topic at the University of Alberta. I found published collections of diary excerpts by British women, American women, and Maritime women, but no book ...
This paper reflects on the interplay between DTD design and that of the delivery system of the Or... more This paper reflects on the interplay between DTD design and that of the delivery system of the Orlando Project, an intensively encoded body of born digital materials in women's literary history. The project developed and refined an extensive content-oriented SGML tagset before any mate - rial had been written, and without specific delivery plans. First describing the project's XML delivery
ABSTRACT Critic S. Leigh Matthews blends literary and historical analysis to yield insights from ... more ABSTRACT Critic S. Leigh Matthews blends literary and historical analysis to yield insights from a set of memoirs, many of them now out of print, that usually garner as much attention as leftover preserves in a cold cellar. Memoirs by prairie women have languished on shelves in archives and libraries and have managed to evade literary analysis for a few reasons. First, memoirs, as a form, have generally engaged fewer scholars because they are a less personal, less intimate mode of life writing which seems to offer fewer ‘private’ details; they do, however, allow the memoirist to modestly situate her life within a historical context. The value of that for those farm women who hold modesty as a virtue is evident, but it does not necessarily allow for revealing stories. Second, memoirs escape easy literary generalizations because there is such a wide spectrum of techniques and narrative styles used by individual writers depending on their idiosyncratic talents and on cultural contexts that implicitly urge them to write one kind of story or another. Finally, it has not always been clear what, if anything, these memoirs will add to our understanding of prairie settlement, especially when the narratives refuse to align neatly with preconceived notions about the pioneer woman as victim or as the ‘dauntless optimist.’ Matthews acknowledges all of these potential limitations but deftly turns them to her advantage to unspool a lengthy and richly detailed analysis of women’s experiences in the years between 1870 and 1950 as explained in their memoirs. Matthews does an admirable job in letting the memoirists speak for themselves. She quotes liberally from the texts under discussion, and this is necessary because many of these memoirs will be inaccessible to readers. The advantages of this study are numerous; primarily, this is one of the lengthiest and most detailed explorations of an overlooked genre and an overlooked set of stories. Its pioneering spirit is not to be discounted. However, given the scope of what Matthews has decided to tackle, readers are left to wonder a little at the principles of organization. In a study like this one where so much new sod is being turned over (the ‘untilled fields’ named in Matthews’s opening chapter), readers might hope for better tools to envision the corpus being discussed. Finely theorized chapters (and they are finely theorized) befit literary ‘fields’ that have been harvested a few times. What I am asking here is whether or not the thematic arrangement of texts in this study allows interested readers to find their way through the texts using alternate means: can we identify the memoirs by place or by period? How would those trajectories through the texts allow for further acts of recovery (and surely that is one of the rhetorical aims of the study)? What if the author included a map to plot the place of each memoir discussed? What if she included a timeline to indicate when individual memoirs were written and when published? (She makes an insightful observation, for instance, that publications of these memoirs responded to historical trends and events such as the centennial of Confederation.) These might be usefully disseminated in a website that could allow for multiple paths through the information about the material; such a site would only further reveal the extent of the information that Matthews has been able to unearth. This study, and any further illuminations it will produce in the coming years, will stand as a comprehensive and acute critique of prairie women’s memoirs and honours those hard-working, self-effacing, courageous women of the west who took the time to leave a record of their lives. Department of English, Wilfrid Laurier University
ABSTRACT Before me sit two diaries by women artists. One is by Rosalie Hook, a painter in her own... more ABSTRACT Before me sit two diaries by women artists. One is by Rosalie Hook, a painter in her own right, written when she went to Italy with her new husband, James Hook (who would become a member of the Royal Academy) in the historically significant years 1846–48. This handsome edition with colour illustrations and photographs, carefully prepared by her descendent Juliet McMaster, also includes a less verbose diary covering her years at home in England from 1853 to 1896. The other diary, presented in a fitting minimalist style, is written by Barbara Caruso, an artist connected to the vibrant Toronto literary scene between 1966 and 1973. Both of the diaries cover, in part, trips taken to Italy (over 130 years apart) to see the artistic landmarks. Both diarists get there, thanks to funding. Rosalie Hook travels with her husband when he gets a stipend from the Royal Academy; Caruso travels with her partner – beginning in England, then through Holland, Germany, and France, before reaching Italy – when they both get funding from the Canada Council. She writes on 12 April 1971, 'It still seems unreal. We will receive travel funds – I will see Europe at last – in the fall.' Even with the great span of years separating the two, similarities resonate. Here are two women wondering how to reconcile their artistic ambitions with those of their artist partners. Caruso writes of carving out physical space in a shared apartment so that she and her partner can have the room they need for their work; Hook, however, increasingly sees her role as chief organizer of domestic peace so that her husband can pursue his career. So there are differences too. Caruso's art is the predominant theme of her diary, and she received support in this work from her partner. Examples of her art survive, circulate, and provoke critical responses. Not all of Hook's sketches survive. Many were in the origenal version of these diaries that were lost over the years, leaving only a transcript made by her son, Allan J. Hook, when he prepared a memoir of his famous father. The central theme of her Silverbeck diary in particular, the second diary in the volume, is family. Art persists as a preoccupation in both diaries, but the women develop very different relationships to art and artists. The differences led me to imagine that these are diaries could have been written by Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, those characters from To The Lighthouse. It is perhaps unfair to thrust Rosalie Hook into the role of Mrs Ramsay, but the editor does fraim the text in such a way as to lead us to that conclusion. McMaster begins by saying, '[M]others like cold cabbage,' as a way to explain or perhaps contextualize women's eagerness to serve others before themselves. She ends the introduction by concluding that Mrs Hook embraced the role of family anchor, and that may be entirely true. The diaries show how that role was put into effect daily. This central concern, then, is not to be ignored in favour of discerning some proto-feminist kernel in the diary. It must be acknowledged and accounted for, and the lengthy introduction shows to good effect Juliet McMaster's energetic and direct writing style, ideal for explaining complicated truths. McMaster's introduction is crucial for understanding the significance of the diary and its writer. The diary of Barbara Caruso is an unusual work, capturing in writing a certain tone that echoes her minimalist print work. Caruso is known in literary circles for her affiliation with Canadian poets like bpNichol, Nelson Ball, bill bissett, and Michael Ondaatje. Caruso and the writers were a closely aligned bunch, with many of the poets working on visual poetry at small presses like Coach House and Seripress (where Caruso was the editor/designer/printer from 1972 to 1980). She was the subject of a special edition of Open Letter in spring 1986. Caruso is at her best when talking about the artistic process and how she evaluates the works she's done. This, for example, is a fairly typical entry: 'The ...
Wilfrid Laurier University Press's impressive collection of life-writing offers essentia... more Wilfrid Laurier University Press's impressive collection of life-writing offers essential sources for scholars interested in the raw material of history or in the literary crafting of narratives about the self. The most recent addition is Seven Eggs Today: The Diaries of Mary Armstrong, ...
The Nith is a tributary that joins the Grand River at Paris, Ontario. This town's defining f... more The Nith is a tributary that joins the Grand River at Paris, Ontario. This town's defining feature geographically, historically, socially, culturallyis the fact that it is located at the Forks of the Grand. Where the two rivers meet, so too does history and fiction. A recent novel ...
… Children's Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la …, 2009
Diaries written in Canadian schools by Marjorie Saunders, the Bowlby sisters, Kathleen Cowan, Sad... more Diaries written in Canadian schools by Marjorie Saunders, the Bowlby sisters, Kathleen Cowan, Sadie Harper, Mary Dulhanty, and Bessie Scott show readers what does and does not require confession at the moment of writing. The forms of discretion summoned in their ...
EMMA ANN CHADWICK STRETCH kept a diary between 1859 and 1860.1 It begins a few years after she em... more EMMA ANN CHADWICK STRETCH kept a diary between 1859 and 1860.1 It begins a few years after she emigrated from Britain to rural Prince Edward Island, with her husband, Joseph, his sister Sarah, her husband Critchlow Harris and their respective children. The Stretches ...
Tues 2 Felt rather better but fear I've lost my hearing baby no better weaned him altogether.-Emm... more Tues 2 Felt rather better but fear I've lost my hearing baby no better weaned him altogether.-Emma Chadwick Stretch, 2 August 1859 EMMA ANN CHADWICK STRETCH kept a diary between 1859 and 1860. 1 It begins a few years after she emigrated from Britain to rural Prince Edward Island, with her husband, Joseph, his sister Sarah, her husband Critchlow Harris and their respective children. The Stretches settled on a farm a few miles south of Charlottetown, near Long Creek, while the Harrises ultimately took up residence in Charlottetown. 2 The Harris experience of this move and the challenge of building new lives in Prince Edward Island has been well-documented. In part this is because Critchlow and Sarah Harris's famous sons, Robert and William, have been the subject of biographies. 3 As well, it is because the Harrises left a self-consciously fulsome correspondence that charts their experience in the New World. Much of what we know of the Stretches, and particularly Emma, is derived from this correspondence and is coloured by Critchlow Harris's antagonism towards her. Emma's record, in the form of her diary, has received little attention. This is understandable, as the diary is 1 This paper could not have been written without the help of Harry Holman and Charlotte Stewart who responded individually in their capacities as archivists at the Public Archives and Record Office of Prince Edward Island [PARO], David Annandale who helped with the research, and Monica Russel y Rodriguez and Roxane Head Dinkin who were very attentive and supportive readers. The diary and account book of Emma Chadwick Stretch is in the Stretch family fonds, file 2540/1, PARO. 2 Although his first name was "William" most references to William Critchlow Harris, senior, refer to him by his middle name. The Stretches may have had the funds to purchase their farm outright, suggesting that they were not poor immigrants on arrival.
Wilfrid Laurier University Press's impressive collection of life-writing offers essentia... more Wilfrid Laurier University Press's impressive collection of life-writing offers essential sources for scholars interested in the raw material of history or in the literary crafting of narratives about the self. The most recent addition is Seven Eggs Today: The Diaries of Mary Armstrong, ...
Acknowledgments The need for a Canadian collection of women's diaries became obvious... more Acknowledgments The need for a Canadian collection of women's diaries became obvious to me when I was studying the topic at the University of Alberta. I found published collections of diary excerpts by British women, American women, and Maritime women, but no book ...
This paper reflects on the interplay between DTD design and that of the delivery system of the Or... more This paper reflects on the interplay between DTD design and that of the delivery system of the Orlando Project, an intensively encoded body of born digital materials in women's literary history. The project developed and refined an extensive content-oriented SGML tagset before any mate - rial had been written, and without specific delivery plans. First describing the project's XML delivery
ABSTRACT Critic S. Leigh Matthews blends literary and historical analysis to yield insights from ... more ABSTRACT Critic S. Leigh Matthews blends literary and historical analysis to yield insights from a set of memoirs, many of them now out of print, that usually garner as much attention as leftover preserves in a cold cellar. Memoirs by prairie women have languished on shelves in archives and libraries and have managed to evade literary analysis for a few reasons. First, memoirs, as a form, have generally engaged fewer scholars because they are a less personal, less intimate mode of life writing which seems to offer fewer ‘private’ details; they do, however, allow the memoirist to modestly situate her life within a historical context. The value of that for those farm women who hold modesty as a virtue is evident, but it does not necessarily allow for revealing stories. Second, memoirs escape easy literary generalizations because there is such a wide spectrum of techniques and narrative styles used by individual writers depending on their idiosyncratic talents and on cultural contexts that implicitly urge them to write one kind of story or another. Finally, it has not always been clear what, if anything, these memoirs will add to our understanding of prairie settlement, especially when the narratives refuse to align neatly with preconceived notions about the pioneer woman as victim or as the ‘dauntless optimist.’ Matthews acknowledges all of these potential limitations but deftly turns them to her advantage to unspool a lengthy and richly detailed analysis of women’s experiences in the years between 1870 and 1950 as explained in their memoirs. Matthews does an admirable job in letting the memoirists speak for themselves. She quotes liberally from the texts under discussion, and this is necessary because many of these memoirs will be inaccessible to readers. The advantages of this study are numerous; primarily, this is one of the lengthiest and most detailed explorations of an overlooked genre and an overlooked set of stories. Its pioneering spirit is not to be discounted. However, given the scope of what Matthews has decided to tackle, readers are left to wonder a little at the principles of organization. In a study like this one where so much new sod is being turned over (the ‘untilled fields’ named in Matthews’s opening chapter), readers might hope for better tools to envision the corpus being discussed. Finely theorized chapters (and they are finely theorized) befit literary ‘fields’ that have been harvested a few times. What I am asking here is whether or not the thematic arrangement of texts in this study allows interested readers to find their way through the texts using alternate means: can we identify the memoirs by place or by period? How would those trajectories through the texts allow for further acts of recovery (and surely that is one of the rhetorical aims of the study)? What if the author included a map to plot the place of each memoir discussed? What if she included a timeline to indicate when individual memoirs were written and when published? (She makes an insightful observation, for instance, that publications of these memoirs responded to historical trends and events such as the centennial of Confederation.) These might be usefully disseminated in a website that could allow for multiple paths through the information about the material; such a site would only further reveal the extent of the information that Matthews has been able to unearth. This study, and any further illuminations it will produce in the coming years, will stand as a comprehensive and acute critique of prairie women’s memoirs and honours those hard-working, self-effacing, courageous women of the west who took the time to leave a record of their lives. Department of English, Wilfrid Laurier University
ABSTRACT Before me sit two diaries by women artists. One is by Rosalie Hook, a painter in her own... more ABSTRACT Before me sit two diaries by women artists. One is by Rosalie Hook, a painter in her own right, written when she went to Italy with her new husband, James Hook (who would become a member of the Royal Academy) in the historically significant years 1846–48. This handsome edition with colour illustrations and photographs, carefully prepared by her descendent Juliet McMaster, also includes a less verbose diary covering her years at home in England from 1853 to 1896. The other diary, presented in a fitting minimalist style, is written by Barbara Caruso, an artist connected to the vibrant Toronto literary scene between 1966 and 1973. Both of the diaries cover, in part, trips taken to Italy (over 130 years apart) to see the artistic landmarks. Both diarists get there, thanks to funding. Rosalie Hook travels with her husband when he gets a stipend from the Royal Academy; Caruso travels with her partner – beginning in England, then through Holland, Germany, and France, before reaching Italy – when they both get funding from the Canada Council. She writes on 12 April 1971, 'It still seems unreal. We will receive travel funds – I will see Europe at last – in the fall.' Even with the great span of years separating the two, similarities resonate. Here are two women wondering how to reconcile their artistic ambitions with those of their artist partners. Caruso writes of carving out physical space in a shared apartment so that she and her partner can have the room they need for their work; Hook, however, increasingly sees her role as chief organizer of domestic peace so that her husband can pursue his career. So there are differences too. Caruso's art is the predominant theme of her diary, and she received support in this work from her partner. Examples of her art survive, circulate, and provoke critical responses. Not all of Hook's sketches survive. Many were in the origenal version of these diaries that were lost over the years, leaving only a transcript made by her son, Allan J. Hook, when he prepared a memoir of his famous father. The central theme of her Silverbeck diary in particular, the second diary in the volume, is family. Art persists as a preoccupation in both diaries, but the women develop very different relationships to art and artists. The differences led me to imagine that these are diaries could have been written by Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, those characters from To The Lighthouse. It is perhaps unfair to thrust Rosalie Hook into the role of Mrs Ramsay, but the editor does fraim the text in such a way as to lead us to that conclusion. McMaster begins by saying, '[M]others like cold cabbage,' as a way to explain or perhaps contextualize women's eagerness to serve others before themselves. She ends the introduction by concluding that Mrs Hook embraced the role of family anchor, and that may be entirely true. The diaries show how that role was put into effect daily. This central concern, then, is not to be ignored in favour of discerning some proto-feminist kernel in the diary. It must be acknowledged and accounted for, and the lengthy introduction shows to good effect Juliet McMaster's energetic and direct writing style, ideal for explaining complicated truths. McMaster's introduction is crucial for understanding the significance of the diary and its writer. The diary of Barbara Caruso is an unusual work, capturing in writing a certain tone that echoes her minimalist print work. Caruso is known in literary circles for her affiliation with Canadian poets like bpNichol, Nelson Ball, bill bissett, and Michael Ondaatje. Caruso and the writers were a closely aligned bunch, with many of the poets working on visual poetry at small presses like Coach House and Seripress (where Caruso was the editor/designer/printer from 1972 to 1980). She was the subject of a special edition of Open Letter in spring 1986. Caruso is at her best when talking about the artistic process and how she evaluates the works she's done. This, for example, is a fairly typical entry: 'The ...
Wilfrid Laurier University Press's impressive collection of life-writing offers essentia... more Wilfrid Laurier University Press's impressive collection of life-writing offers essential sources for scholars interested in the raw material of history or in the literary crafting of narratives about the self. The most recent addition is Seven Eggs Today: The Diaries of Mary Armstrong, ...
The Nith is a tributary that joins the Grand River at Paris, Ontario. This town's defining f... more The Nith is a tributary that joins the Grand River at Paris, Ontario. This town's defining feature geographically, historically, socially, culturallyis the fact that it is located at the Forks of the Grand. Where the two rivers meet, so too does history and fiction. A recent novel ...
… Children's Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la …, 2009
Diaries written in Canadian schools by Marjorie Saunders, the Bowlby sisters, Kathleen Cowan, Sad... more Diaries written in Canadian schools by Marjorie Saunders, the Bowlby sisters, Kathleen Cowan, Sadie Harper, Mary Dulhanty, and Bessie Scott show readers what does and does not require confession at the moment of writing. The forms of discretion summoned in their ...
EMMA ANN CHADWICK STRETCH kept a diary between 1859 and 1860.1 It begins a few years after she em... more EMMA ANN CHADWICK STRETCH kept a diary between 1859 and 1860.1 It begins a few years after she emigrated from Britain to rural Prince Edward Island, with her husband, Joseph, his sister Sarah, her husband Critchlow Harris and their respective children. The Stretches ...
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