Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918

Conclusion: Observations on the Canon

As women writers became increasingly prominent toward the end of the nineteenth century, they received frequent coverage in general and literary magazines: sometimes in inclusive articles about Canadian authors, and sometimes in articles dedicated solely to female writers. Most widely read was Thomas O’Hagan’s “Some Canadian Women Writers,” an inventory that was published three times, its first appearance in Catholic World in 1896, quickly followed by condensed versions in the Week and in J. Castell Hopkins’ Canada: An Encyclopedia of the Country.1 Most such studies were written by men;2 their tone was always laudatory and usually refrained from being excessively patronizing, for women were seen as important contributors to the growing promise of a strong cultural identity to accompany Canada’s political destiny. In 1899, writing on “Recent Canadian Fiction ” for the New York Forum, Laurence Burpee commented: “It will be observed that in fiction, as in verse, Canadian women are marching apace with the members of the opposite sex; and this applies as well to the quality as to the quantity of their productions.”3 While the selection of named authors in these articles often reflected the critic’s own circle of acquaintances, when reviewed as an ensemble, they offer a distinct canon. Articles with an historical focus recognized Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, Anna Jameson, Rosanna Leprohon , and Isabella Valancy Crawford. Commentators looking at the present and future listed the most promising living writers as Sara Jeannette Duncan, Susie Frances Harrison, Pauline Johnson, Blanche Macdonnell, Agnes Maule Machar, Jean McIlwraith, Marshall Saunders, and Ethelwyn Wetherald. To some degree, therefore, nineteenth-century women writers identified as Canadian were spared the exclusion from the gendered 193 conclusion
Oberservations on the Canon definition of authorship that marginalized vast numbers of British and American women who competed with professional male writers in the commercial marketplace.4 Despite such attention, the stakes were loaded against women when it came to elite accolades such as membership in the Royal Society of Canada, founded in 1882, which admitted the first woman to its flourishing literary section with the election of Gabrielle Roy in 1947. The contrasting fate of two late nineteenth-century writers illuminates the role of gender in the shifting construction of reputation in Canada. Sara Jeannette Duncan, quickly recognized as a major critic and author while she was active from the mid-1880s through the 1910s, subsided into nearly total eclipse after her death in 1922. The perspicacity of Malcolm Ross in reissuing The Imperialist in the New Canadian Library in 1961 led to renewed interest in the 1970s from a fresh generation of scholars, operating under a variety of theoretical perspectives from new criticism to feminism and post-colonialism. Over the past thirty years, Duncan has been the subject of many articles, theses, and books, and much of her writing has been brought back into print. On the other hand, now banished for its implicit racism is the dialect habitant writing, once canonized as the authentic voice of Canada, which was best known in the verse of William Henry Drummond.5 Underlying these canonical shifts are not only changing assessments of content, style, and ideology, but also institutional factors relating to gender. Duncan, whose education stopped at teacher training and whose only claim to significance was her writing, possessed no external cultural capital to buttress her reputation. In contrast, Drummond’s professional status as a medical doctor and his social acquaintance with cultural power brokers earned him election to Britain’s Royal Society of Literature in 1898 and to the Royal Society of Canada in 1899, followed by honorary degrees from the University of Toronto in 1902 and Bishop’s College in 1905. So divergent has been their later status that scholarly writings about Duncan, as recorded in the MLA database, outnumber those about Drummond by a factor of ten (in July 2009, there were seventy-four items on Duncan and seven on Drummond). The recuperation of Duncan and other early Canadian women writers that began in the 1970s has led to one of our favourite cultural myths: the notion that “the number of excellent women writers in Canada is remarkable .”6 In a spirit of smugness, naiveté, or optimism, or perhaps in accordance with Canadians’ proverbial “niceness”7 or what one writer has called “the national desire to please,”8 we continue to embrace the view 194 conclusion expressed in 1984 by an editor of...