A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada: The Journals, Letters, and Art of Anne Langton (review)

When Anne Langton arrived at the ‘little mansion’ of her brother John, in Upper Canada in the summer of 1837, she was struck by the roughness all around her. Although she marvelled at what a few settlers had already managed to accomplish, there was still so much to be done to transform the wild woods into a new home, she reported to her sister-in-law. Over the next ten years, Anne Langton’s initial amazement and, one suspects, dismay at her circumstances were gradually replaced by a growing confidence in her own ability to cope with the many demands of this young settler society. Anne Langton never lost her sense of being an English gentlewoman; at the same time, she adapted to her new circumstances and, through her writing, her art, and her sense of duty to her family and to the community, she made a place for herself in this new world.

We were first introduced to Anne Langton in 1950 when one of her Canadian nephews, H.H. Langton, published an edited collection of her letters. Although A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada has been reprinted a number of times and Anne Langton is one of but a small group of fascinating and accomplished women settlers, her story is still not well known. This significantly expanded edition of A Gentlewoman will go a long way to bringing Anne’s life and voice to a twenty-first-century audience. Moreover, by skilfully situating Anne’s experiences, her writing, and her art into the broader social context of the nineteenth-century world, editor Barbara Williams has produced a volume that will be invaluable to colonial scholars.

The heart of this rather lengthy book – Langton’s correspondence to family and friends in England over her first ten years in Upper Canada – remains true to the original edition. Williams has reordered some of the letters to better reflect Anne’s and her family’s experiences. She has also judicially re-edited many of the entries to include passages from a collection of letters privately published by one of Anne’s English nieces. The letters are lightly annotated – to identify individuals who appear only briefly, to explain changes from the original text, or to highlight the significance of key passages.

The greatest strength of this new edition is, however, Williams’s new and highly informative introduction. Williams is very conscious of the need ‘to allow for ambiguity, complexity, [and] paradox’ in her subject’s life (xvi). Anne Langton was a gentlewoman, a colonial settler, a community leader, a talented artist, a devoted daughter and aunt, and an accomplished diarist and journalist. How a single woman living in Great Britain and Upper Canada negotiated these roles rested on a host of factors, and Williams skilfully weaves into her narrative of Anne’s life a perceptive appreciation of the latest scholarship about nineteenth-century British and colonial societies. Williams also considers the letters and journals in terms of life writing, and highlights how the very act of writing provided Anne with the means to survive as ‘a creative, intelligent, and social woman’ (51). What is particularly intriguing is Williams’s portrait of Anne Langton, the artist, until now an unexplored aspect of her life. The introduction is liberally illustrated by a number of Anne’s own paintings and sketches. More significantly, Williams’s readings of a few of these images help to elucidate Anne’s experiences and expectations; Williams also uses them to explore in a wider context how British sensibilities of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque were challenged by the New World. Anne was an amateur artist who in another time could have used her talent to gain financial and personal independence. But, as Williams explains, the genteel code of conduct and attitudes to women artists generally precluded this possibility.

Barbara Williams’s edition of A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada is a fine piece...