Lady Landlords of Prince Edward Island: Imperial Dreams and the Defence of Property (review)

On the heels of Rural Protest on Prince Edward Island from British Colonization to the Escheat Movement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), historian Rusty Bittermann has returned to the contested terrain of Prince Edward Island's 'land question,' this time in fruitful collaboration with legal scholar Margaret McCallum.

Perhaps the most impressive achievement of Bittermann and McCallum's lucid and lively monograph is that it offers new insights on an issue that has long dominated the historiography of pre-Confederation Prince Edward Island. A confluence of popular memory, political opportunism, and historical discourse long cast the land question in Manichaean terms of 'evil' absentee proprietors versus 'good' resident tenants. Modern scholarship has systematically complicated that convenient framing of the leasehold system of land tenure that was imposed on Prince Edward Island in 1767 at the outset of British rule, quickly became a New World anachronism, engendered lasting controversy, but stubbornly persisted until 1875. The dualist construct has surrendered to a triangular relationship involving landlords, tenants, and their intermediaries, local land agents and a self-interested Island government. It is within this general paradigm that Lady Landlords is situated.

In Rural Protest on Prince Edward Island, Bittermann argued the grassroots nature of land agitation in the colony and broadened its frame of reference by linking it to reform movements in Britain and British America. Lady Landlords turns its attention to the opposite end of the land question spectrum, exploring the proprietorial perspective as embodied in four female landlords and arguing their central importance in the drawn-out drama that ultimately resulted in the liquidation of leasehold tenure on Prince Edward Island. Sisters Anne and Jane Saunders, the heirs of two original grantees, brought their estates into their marriages: Anne to Robert Dundas, later Viscount Melville, and Jane (unhappily) to the 10th Earl of Westmorland. Jane's daughter, Georgiana Fane, succeeded to her mother's Island property, while Charlotte Sulivan was daughter and heir of a third-generation proprietor. Her 67,000-acre estate was by the 1870s probably the largest remaining on Prince Edward Island. All these women retained some agency in the management of their estates, either by remaining single (Fane and Sulivan) or through complicated marriage settlements (patiently unpacked by McCallum's legal expertise). Each receives her own chapter, and the resulting narrative spans almost the entire leasehold era on Prince Edward Island. In the final decade of the land question, both Fane and Sulivan played leading roles, lobbying articulately, persistently, but vainly to protect their estates and their interests, and in Sulivan's case launching the last legal challenge to the legislation that expropriated her estate.

For the first time in many years, Lady Landlords returns biography to centre stage in discussion of the land question. In the process, it pushes both the research and the perspective off-Island, addressing the leasehold issue from the perspective of the much maligned 'absentee proprietors.' Here is the view from Great Britain, where leasehold remained in the mid-nineteenth century normative rather than anachronistic. As the title suggests, Lady Landlords also introduces gender into the analysis, making this one of the very few forays into gender history in the entire historiography of pre-Confederation Prince Edward Island. While temperamentally different, the lady landlords shared interests, influence, but also disabilities based on gender and social status, but the authors are cautious about generalizations, noting how unique factors such as marital relationships, the relative importance of Island estates to individual incomes, and changing conditions could dictate differences. If it is risky to extrapolate from these four lady landlords to other female proprietors (no fewer than thirty-four of them in 1875), how much should we extend their experience to the proprietorial faction generally, or even to the absentees? Those using the study should, like the authors, exercise a measure of caution.

One of the...