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In MR. HOGARTH’S WILL (1865), the Scottish-Australian feminist novelist Catherine Helen Spence portrays the frustration of educated women who needed to support themselves. Hoping to find work with a bookseller or publisher in Edinburgh, Jane Melville is shown “eight or ten nice-looking girls ... busily engaged in stitching together pamphlets and sheets to be ready for the bookbinder.” Upon learning how little they are paid, she comments bitterly, “you have girls at low wages to do what is tedious, and men at higher to do what is artistic; that is a very fair division of labour.” The publisher responds, “Nay, nay; I believe our profession, or rather trade, is more liberal to the sex than any other. Write a good book, and [we’ll] give you a good price for it: design a fine illustration, and that has a market value independent of sex.”1 Chronically undereducated, barred from professional training, and conditioned to remain within the home circle, middle-class women who needed to earn money or desired relatively respectable self-expression exercised their pens, whether in Europe or North America. Some who catered to the growing market for family-oriented fiction wrote their way into considerable wealth. American examples are particularly telling: by the 1850s, nearly half the popular books produced in the US were by women, and by 1872 they wrote nearly three-quarters of the novels.2 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “the first of the great global best sellers that changed the marketing and influence of fiction,” sold “305,000 the first year in the United States, and two million around the world,”3 bringing Harriet Beecher Stowe $10,000 in royalties in the first four months after its publication in 1852. Mary Mapes Dodge’s children’s classic, Hans Brinker, sold 300,000 copies in 1865, thus classing her book, along with Dickens’ Our Mutual 91 five  Canadian Women and American Markets Friend, as one of the two top sellers of that year.4 Louisa May Alcott, who had the foresight to retain the copyright to Little Women (1868) rather than sell it outright for $1,000, achieved financial solvency with her first royalty cheque for $8,500.5 It is one of the ironies of women’s literary history that Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis) began her career as one of America’s highest-paid journalists with Ruth Hall (1855), her bestselling account of the tribulations of a desperate woman writer. London or New York? Angela Woollacott has recently shown that between 1870 and 1940, the vogue of attempting “to try her fortune in London” attracted “tens of thousands ” of Australian women to the Imperial centre.6 This trend was followed by far fewer Canadians, due to the proximity and prosperity of the US. The situation of the Canadian writer seeking economic success was aptly summarized in Sara Jeannette Duncan’s 1887 assertion that “the market for Canadian literary wares of all sorts is self-evidently New York.”7 If we consider the six major anglophone Canadian poets of the late nineteenth century, we can see the role of gender in determining the possible trajectory of a writer’s career. The two Ottawa poets, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott, who were both supported by secure civil service positions, published much of their work locally and mostly at their own expense.8 The only way for the two New Brunswick poets, Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman, to indulge their penchant for rather bohemian literary lives was to jettison Canada (and the academic careers toward which their education had pointed) for New England and New York. But the opportunity to be a civil servant, poet-professor, or jaunty vagabond was unavailable to Canada’s two leading female poets of the period, Isabella Valancy Crawford and Pauline Johnson. As unmarried, self-supporting women, both lived by their wits and their pens. From her home, first in Peterborough and later in Toronto, Crawford sold at least two serial novels and about two dozen stories to some of Frank Leslie’s periodicals in New York between 1872 and 1885.9 But her primary gift was for poetry, most of which appeared in Toronto newspapers where payment was meagre at best. The posthumous appearance of one poem in Outing,10 the prominent New York recreation magazine that published many Canadian writers (including Pauline Johnson), suggests that Crawford’s route to solvency may have been cut short by her sudden early death; in the following decades...

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