Collected Short Stories of Isabella Valancy Crawford ed. by Len Early and Michael Peterman (review)

This collection of short stories by early Canadian writer Isabella Valancy Crawford (1850–87) contributes significantly to the study of this important literary figure and to the study of early Canadian literature more generally. Critics have long been aware of the problems with Crawford’s body of work – it often exists in multiple versions, it has often been poorly edited, some of it has been left out of bibliographies, and some has been simply missing altogether. Early and Peterman’s response to these challenges is remarkable. After combing the periodicals in the United States and in Canada in which Crawford was known to have published, they present ‘accurate and readable texts of all thirty-two of the short stories known to have been published during her lifetime.’ They also append two new posthumously published stories and another story taken from her manuscript collection at Queen’s University, which they describe as ‘the most intriguing and most finished of the half dozen or so remaining manuscript stories or fragments of stories’ among her papers.

Crawford has most often been considered a poet rather than a writer of fiction, but this collection establishes more than ever before Crawford’s significant engagement with the short story genre. Early and Peterman explain some possible reasons why Crawford’s fiction has been overlooked – not the least of which has been the difficulty of finding her published fiction – and they facilitate a significant turn in our attention by making these stories readily available. The stories are carefully and responsibly edited, no small task given the editorial problems surrounding Crawford’s published work. As important a contribution as the stories themselves, however, is the work Early and Peterman do in their critical introduction, examining the stories as a collective, contextualizing them within Crawford’s literary moment, and, in doing so, identifying patterns, key tropes, and consistent authorial preoccupations. They open the door to critical readings of Crawford’s fiction in the same way D.M.R. Bentley opened up readings of her poetry with his 1987 edition of her long poem Malcolm’s Katie. The result is a fuller picture of Crawford as a fiction writer and as a participant in the literary marketplace of her day – a picture that is impossible to see when we look at one or two stories in isolation.

Early and Peterman also spend time positioning Crawford and her literary aesthetic within the genre of short fiction broadly. They acknowledge the dearth of critical attention paid to short fiction writing in Canada between 1850 and 1880 and suggest some possibilities for considering Crawford – who wrote prolifically during these years – as part of the continuum of creative work in the nineteenth century, standing in the transition between Thomas Chandler Haliburton and Duncan Campbell Scott. In fact, in interrogating Crawford’s use of melodrama and those moments where she moves beyond what they call ‘melodramatic caricature,’ they go so far as to suggest that Crawford’s later work ‘uncannily anticipates Sinclair Ross’s powerful stories of domestic conflict and despair in dustbowl Saskatchewan more than fifty years later.’

Reading through the collection, it becomes clear that the editors are right in identifying an ‘uneven’ quality to Crawford’s short story writing; one can feel the tension between the woman who wrote and the woman who wrote for money. But it also becomes abundantly clear that Early and Peterman’s analysis of Crawford as a playful, intelligent writer, keenly engaged with the contemporary issues surrounding her, particularly with regard to gender, sexuality, and morality, is equally accurate. The Collected Stories certainly confirms Crawford’s place in the literary canon and should excite students of Canadian literature with new possibilities for exploring this writer’s creative talents.