The Heiress vs the Establishment: Mrs. Campbell's Campaign for Legal Justice (review)

Mrs Campbell would be pleased with this new edition of Where Angels Fear To Tread, her narrative of her efforts to sanction her uncle, William Drummond Hogg, a prominent Ontario lawyer, for breach of trust in his handling of her mother's estate. Completed in 1935 and published by Mrs Campbell in 1940, the book describes how Mrs Campbell, stymied by a legal system that was hierarchical, male, deferential to authority, and suspicious of outsiders, achieved victory and vindication in the Privy Council, then Canada's highest court of appeal, where she argued her case in person, the first woman to do so. Legal historian Constance Backhouse and her sister Nancy Backhouse, a judge of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, have added an introduction, epilogue, and extensive notes that give a wealth of empirical detail about Mrs Campbell and her times.

Alas, as the epilogue relates, Mrs Campbell's 'glorious moment' in London was followed by more resistance in the Canadian courts. Besides commencing an action to enforce the Privy Council judgment, Mrs Campbell applied to the Ontario Supreme Court to deny Hogg the right to practise law. When that failed, she brought a complaint against Mr Hogg to the Law Society of Upper Canada, the body responsible for licensing and disciplining Ontario lawyers. The Law Society is governed by benchers, elected by the membership. The bencher who chaired the society's discipline committee was Newton Wesley Rowell, president of Toronto General Trusts Corporation, the other antagonist in Mrs Campbell's ordeal; the complaint was ignored and eventually dismissed. So too were the criminal charges that Mrs Campbell brought against Hogg. In the end, she spent more on pursuing her case than she recovered; perhaps she used the final phrase of Alexander Pope's line from An Essay on Criticism, 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,' for her book title to convey her rueful recognition of the cost of her struggle, as well as her trepidation at venturing into unfamiliar forums.

In the epilogue, the Backhouses review the evidence of Hogg's management of Mrs Campbell's mother's estate, and conclude that Hogg used the money himself, paying interest to the estate but pocketing the principal. While rejecting Mrs Campbell's claims of concerted action against her by benchers and judges intent on protecting their own, the Backhouses argue that many of the lawyers and judges implicated in the litigation acted improperly, perhaps influenced by long-standing friendships and professional connections, or by their desire to protect a member of the legal elite from public censure. The illustrations alone – page after page of stern, severe, white men in stiff collars – speak eloquently of the obstacles in Mrs Campbell's way. The daughter of James Bethune, QC, and stepdaughter of Sir William Pearce Howland, former lieutenant-governor of Ontario, Mrs Campbell found that her gender nonetheless made her an outsider in Ontario's legal elite. Nor could she gain acceptance through her husband, an Episcopalian minister in Boston, who had neither the money nor the social status to provide cover for her.

With all other avenues of redress closed to her, Mrs Campbell resorted to picketing outside the offices of the Law Society and the Toronto General Trusts Corporation. The Backhouses suggest that 'the stress and pressures of the interminable legal proceedings had caused her, as it has occasionally caused other litigants, to unravel to some degree. At the end of the protracted lawsuits, she simply could not bring herself to stop' (177). But the reader is left with the question that lawyers often face with clients who are obsessed with the injustices perpetrated against them: which came first, the obsessive personality or the injustice?

Mrs Campbell's story, supported and augmented with the Backhouses' careful and comprehensive research, provides a fascinating and sometimes devastating portrait of the...