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Sojourning Sisters, The Lives and Letters of Jessie and Annie McQueen, and: Constance Lindsay Skinner, Writing on the Frontier (review)
- The Canadian Historical Review
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 85, Number 1, March 2004
- pp. 140-143
- 10.1353/can.2004.0025
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
The Canadian Historical Review 85.1 (2004) 140-143
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Sojourning Sisters: The Lives and Letters of Jessie and Annie McQueen. Jean Barman. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2003. Pp. 304, illus. $50.00
Constance Lindsay Skinner: Writing on the Frontier. Jean Barman. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2002. Pp. viii, 360, illus. $50.00
What was it like to be there? What was it like to get on a train in Nova Scotia, cross a continent, and see virgin forest? Or to leave the remote north and travel to a crowded metropolis? How did it feel to cast off family ties and reinvent a life on the frontier - be that a physical or a literary frontier?
In two recent biographies, Jean Barman has explored the lives of women born in the nineteenth century who took advantage of the new freedoms of their era. Barman, a professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, has made deft use of women's stories to explore larger aspects of our past. These books illustrate the challenges of writing about the lives of forgotten women. Behind the impressive scholarship, the prose style, the adroit selection of facts on which to construct a narrative, there lurks the question in a reader's mind: Why should we care? Plenty of people in our past have been forgotten: What makes these particular individuals worth resurrecting? In each of these books, Barman makes a good argument for recollecting her chosen women. However, the argument is different in each case.
In Sojourning Sisters, the subjects themselves provide a sparkling answer. Jessie and Annie McQueen were born into a penurious farming family in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, in the 1860s. The McQueens were typical of their neighbours: they all shared Scots descent, a strong commitment to Presbyterianism, and a firm belief in literacy. Jessie, the fifth of six daughters, was a shy, dutiful young woman; Annie, the youngest, was a willful, plucky flirt. Both trained as school teachers. In the 1880s the Nova Scotia Department of Education paid teachers between $45 and $65 per five-month term. The salary in British Columbia was $50 to $60 per month. Given their father's inability to make a living from his farm, both girls decided they should spend $62.50 on a second-class ticket to cross Canada on the newly opened cpr, so they could work out west and send money home. In theory they would only 'sojourn' in the untamed West and, like biblical travellers, eventually return to Nova Scotia. In practice they became British Columbians.
The narrative in Sojourning Sisters is carried by the extensive and vibrant correspondence between the various family members. Brave Annie was the first to head west, but Jessie was determined to follow: [End Page140] 'Oh Nan when we get together won't our tongues wag? Whoops! I wish I had you within reach of my sisterly clutches.' Annie recognized the strain their departure would put on their parents, whose elder children had by now all left home: 'My heart aches when I think of mother and father's loneliness, after you go away, I could just cry for them.' The sisters began their bc lives teaching in schools only a few miles apart in the Nicola Valley. They learnt to ride astride; they picked up a few words of Chinook; they negotiated the subtle social relationships with the First Nations and Chinese people they had never met back home and the children of mixed parentage within their classrooms.
In the next few decades, the sisters' lives diverged. Annie married and raised a family in British Columbia. At one point she and her three children lived in a one-room log ranch deep in the forest near Salmon Arm (north of the Okanagan Valley), growing most of their food, while her husband was a travelling salesman. She confided to Jessie, 'I have to work so hard that I am utterly exhausted by the time I get to bed...