Canadian Writers and Their Works. Fiction Series. Volume 1 ed. by Robert Lecker, Jack David, Ellen Quigley (review)

444 LETTERS IN CANADA 1983 Robert Lecker, Jack David, Ellen Quigley, editors. Canadian Writers and Their Works . Fiction Series. Volume 1 ECW Press. 272. $28.00 This is the first of the twenty-volume Canadian Writers and Their Works series from ECW Press. Intended as a comprehensive reference work, the series might have been only a new and exhaustive organization of established data and attitudes. But the vigour and originality of most of the entries in this first volume suggest that the series will be more than that. Moreover, each book will include a 'unifying' introduction by George Woodcock. In his introduction to these first five essays, Woodcock points out some of the prominentfindings of individual contributors at the same time as he shepherds the separate and discrete essays into a broader intellectual context, asking 'when does a new place create a new voice?' Pursuing a more or less predictable route past the greater and lesser landmarks of Canadian literature, the series begins with The History of Emily Montague, a book distinguished by its rather lonely position as the first Canadian novel. This isolation is somewhat relieved by Lorraine McMullen's essay on Frances Brooke, which describes Brooke's English career as a dramatist and novelist. Although McMullen's treatment of Emily Montague itself only reminds us of the book's most evident features - its feminist attitudes and its manlpulation of some Edenic themes, for instance - her discussion of Brooke's other work is illuminating, particularly her description of what she sees as Brooke's move, after Emily Montague, towards picaresque narrative inspired by Fielding. Michael A. Peterman writes about Susanna Moodie. Moodie, he says, is a writer 'whom we have, out of our own cultural needs, made over into a variety of striking and often distorting images: In correcting these distortions, Peterman reveals a Moodie who is no less striking and perhaps even more complex and fascinating than the serviceable images we are used to. And his careful tracking of the provenance of Roughing It is extremely pertinent. His collations of the English and Canadian versions of the book will make readers think more deeply and precisely about Moodie's encounter with the New World and her intricate ties with the Old. Dennis Duffy, writing about John Richardson, also has to deal with an author whose reputation rests on one book. But while Peterman's discussion of Moodie discloses the career and lifetime surrounding that one book, Duffy's treatment of Richardson focuses on the imagination from which Wacousta issued. The biographical material Duffy summarizes is matter-of-fact; it does, however, remind us of Richardson's rather edgy and futile behaviour. Thereafter, Wacousta dominates the essay, and rightly so. Despite its gaudy style, Wacousta has endured, as Duffy points HUMANITIES 445 out, and it remains a force to be reckoned with. Duffy does so splendidly, conducting a lively reading of text, and demonstrating that 'the Richardsonian world remains ultimately amorphous, a cascade of experience in which the chief meaning lies in this: the resolute observance of chaos by a party seeking to overcome it or, at least, to view it without flinching: Catharine Parr Traill is also liable to be treated as a one-book author, but Carl Ballstadt's essay about her repudiates the limitations of such a focus, examining in some detail her entire canon, including her journals. Bal1stadt maintains that the elegant style and structure of The Backwoods of Canada are reasons for its abiding reputation: he shows that the principal formal aspects of the text are 'balance' and 'antithesis: and he explains their relation to the book's content. He discovers similar shapeliness in her late works, too - in Pearls and Pebbles, especially. In 'Three Writers of Victorian Canada' Carole Gerson deals not with authors with lopsided, one-book reputations, but with writers whose reputations have almost vanished into the tides of time: Rosanna Leprohon, James De Mille, Agnes Maule Machar. Yet these three were acknowledged figures in their own era. Indeed, Machar - 'almost unknown today' - was the most widely read of the three. How is it that writers who so successfully addressed the readers of their own time can have become nearly negligible...