Marriage of Minds: Isabel and Oscar Skelton Reinventing Canada (review)

To be sure, biography tends to privilege the privileged - those great men and women who, in the course of their public and private lives, created a personal archive of letters and diaries and speeches and books. But if done really well, biography tells the story of a single life at the same time as it tells larger stories; if done well, these stories are woven seamlessly together. For example, Maria Tippett's Emily Carr is a detailed account of one artist struggling to find her voice in a male-dominated art world, and it is an investigation into violation, pain, loneliness, and reconciliation that lies at the heart of the human condition. David Garrow's Time on the Cross will occasionally decentre Martin Luther King in order to tell the biography of a great movement in addition to the biography of a great man. David Frank's J.B. McLachlan is the biography of a near saint who led the coal miners of Cape Breton in the 1910s and 1920s, and it is a social history of coal mining and coal miners in Cape Breton. Terry Crowley's Marriage of Minds: Isabel and Oscar Skelton Reinventing Canada joins this list of books that do more than recount a single life. In point of fact, Marriage of Minds is the story of one marriage, two lives, and many currents in twentieth-century Canadian history.

Marriage of Minds opens with a letter. 'Early in July 1904 a letter arrived at the post office in the hamlet of Antrim, a pinpoint on the map in Fitzroy Township thirty-five kilometres north of the nation's capital and twelve kilometres south of Arnprior, where the Madawaska River meets the Ottawa' (9). It is not until some seven or eight pages later that we learn what the letter contains - a marriage proposal from Oscar Skelton, then a would-be graduate student living in Philadelphia and working for a magazine called the Book Lover, to Isabel Murphy, an equally brilliant graduate of Queen's University who was, at this point, living with her family while she figured out what exactly it was she wanted to do with her life. Crowley's decision to open the book with the letter, the nation's capital, and the joining of two rivers was well crafted. The book is about a marriage between one of the most powerful men in Ottawa in the 1920s and 1930s and a writer who used history and literary criticism to imagine an independent Canada with its own culture and literary tradition. That marriage was not always an equitable one and, like the Madawaska River emptying into the much larger Ottawa River, Isabel's career and identity were often lost in her husband's. Isabel and Oscar Skelton both worked to realize a shared goal - Canada's independence - but it is Oscar's life and legacy that have captured the lion's share of our attention. It is not an accident that Crowley subtitled his book Isabel and Oscar Skelton Reinventing Canada and not Oscar and Isabel Skelton Reinventing Canada.

Following their marriage in 1904, Isabel and Oscar went to Chicago in 1905, where, for the second time, Oscar began his doctorate in political economy at the University of Chicago. In 1906 he returned to Queen's on a fellowship; two years later he defended this thesis and was appointed assistant professor at his undergraduate alma mater. Published in 1911, his thesis 'attempted to show that the existing economic order, evolving as its imperfections were revealed and surmounted, provided better mechanisms for satisfying human wants than those forecast by socialists' (38). (Incidentally, Vladimir Lenin described Socialism: A Critical Analysis as 'the best book on socialism by a bourgeois scholar which I have ever read' [9].) Taking his cue from liberal progressivism in the United States and New Liberalism in Britain, Skelton believed in a positive role for governments. Meanwhile, Skelton continued...