A Flannel Shirt & Liberty: British Emigrant Gentlewomen in the Canadian West, 1880–1914 ed. by Susan Jackel (review)

150 Western American Literature nation and the courage to go all the way. The Boston massacre by the young men of the village was a challenge to his authority but with a patriotic pageant he turned it into a heroic event of the reign of Maguina, and he used the cargo of the ship to provide wealth for his pot latch. It was an insult to him that the young men were avenging with the massacre and at the end the villages are ready to give their lives and what is left of their fortunes to ransom him, even though he is no longer Tyee. Even in his failures and his selfdelusions there is a certain grandeur. He has style. Fog Woman, Maguina’s wife and Siam’s sister, is a woman of great wisdom, determination, courage, and guile. In the way she gets rid of the young girls who flock to Maguina’s bed when she is away, in her treatment of her mean and shabby relatives, in the way she takes charge when things have gone far enough, in her affair with the sailor John Jay (John Jewitt), and in her rescue of Maguina we see a woman who has style. There is a deep affection between Fog Woman and Maguina; they are faithful to each other in their fashions. (The sexual relationships in the novel are a source of infinite delight.) In her calm and common sense, she is a contrast to Siam and Maguina. She is the one to recognize that it is otter skins and barter, not guns and heroics, that count. She shows that it is wives who keep the even tenor of the way. There are times when presentations of Nootka culture intrude: some­ times dialog consists of Nootka phrase and English translation and some “our way/their way” comparisons are obvious. But these rhetorical problems are more than compensated for by the interplay of character, culture and Fortune in the story. ROSCOE L. BUCKLAND Western Washington University A Flannel Shirt & Liberty: British Emigrant Gentlewomen in the Canadian West, 1880-1914. Edited by Susan Jackel. (Vancouver and London: Uni­ versity of British Columbia Press, 1982.) “I like the endless riding over the endless prairie. . . . I like the herds of cattle feeding. . . . I like to ride with the guns. . . . Besides, I like a flannel shirt, and liberty,” wrote Agnes Skrine née Higginson, after she had married an Alberta rancher and thus become one of the British emigrant gentlewomen represented by this collection of late nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury documents. If Skrine, as an accomplished writer, was atypical of the thousands of “excess” (outnumbering males) gentlewomen in the United Kingdom at the turn of the century, she is yet the very type of the successful “lady” emigrant: spirited, energetic, at once adaptable and inventive, and able to look with humor on the sometimes appalling conditions she meets in the new land. Asked by his wife if one such new lady emigrant seemed “stuckup,” a reconnoitering husband reported, “I know nowt about that, when I got there she wor carting t’dirt out o’t shanty by t’barrerful.” Reviews 151 This collecton of fourteen documents, divided by decades and inter­ spersed with commentaries that provide both context and continuity, includes women’s responses to a C.P.R. questionnaire (What Women Say of the Canadian North-West, used as propaganda for settlement) and even one article by an Englishman settled in the United States who gives a bleak picture of the English ranchwoman’s life — and whom Agnes Skrine rebuts. But the bulk of the selections are accounts by individual women of life in Western Canada. The informative introduction supplies some details about the society from which redundant gentlewomen came, as well as about the one they entered. Jackel also speculates on the positive impact of British middle-class women on Western Canadian life. Numerous black and white plates show the reality behind the settlers’ or visitors’words. In one photo two women home­ steaders, dressed up, books on laps, sit in front of their tiny, possibly even windowless, first dwelling; in another a group of women and children, bonnetted and most of...