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Reviewed by:
  • Travels and Identities: Elizabeth and Adam Shortt in Europe, 1911 ed. by Peter E. Paul Dembski
  • Eva-Marie Kröller
Travels and Identities: Elizabeth and Adam Shortt in Europe, 1911. Peter E. Paul Dembski, ed. Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017. Pp. xi + 268, $19.00 paper

Drawing on voluminous archival resources available at the University of Waterloo and Queen's University, Travels and Identities presents an edited version of the diaries and letters of Elizabeth Smith and her husband Adam Shortt from their trip to Europe in 1911, specifically to Britain, France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. The Shortts combined tourism with professional and social networking, shopping for clothes, and hunting for rare books and prints.

The biographies of both Shortts–one a feminist and a female pioneer in the practice of medicine, the other an influential historian and economist – have received attention previously, as has Canadian travel writing. In particular, Dembski credits the scholarship of Veronica Strong-Boag on Smith's diaries (1980), as well as Cecilia Morgan's study, 'A Happy Holiday': English-Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism, 1870– 1930 (University of Toronto Press), published in 2008 and therefore not quite as recent as suggested here. [End Page 136]

One of the many reasons for which Canadians undertook travel to Europe was to consult with medical specialists, and Elizabeth Smith found herself having to do so unintentionally when, during the last few days of the crossing to Britain, she developed glaucoma and had to undergo immediate surgery to save her eye. The operation and subsequent recovery in an expensive private hospital take up much space in Dembski's first chapter, and rightly so, because Smith's knowledgeable description of medical care and comparisons with the Canadian equivalent provide valuable information. Likewise, the way the Shortts navigated this potentially catastrophic situation reveals much about their companionship.

Obviously, Smith's ability to read and write was affected by her diminished vision, and for a while, she was unable to keep up her correspondence as she would have liked, or even to read the letters they received. Adam Shortt struggled to read out their daughter's letter to her: "He labored & labored & guessed & skipped & went back & came up at it again" (102). When her eyesight improved, she spent long sessions catching up with her diary, and it would have been interesting to speculate on the differences between these telescoped versions and the day-to-day format she originally intended. Surprisingly, considering that the book appears in the Life Writing Series of Wilfrid Laurier University Press, the discussion is sketchy on diaries and letters as genres of life writing, although both have received substantial attention in recent years. Perhaps it is this omission that has the editor ignore the possibility that Smith is not so much "deeply offended" by her husband's "morbid desire" to buy ever more books than being affectionately ironical about his foible (255).

One wonders if some of the omissions, misspellings, and erroneous copying down of names that populate Smith's writing are the result of having to juggle a battery of different types of spectacles and covering one eye with a patch to avoid straining it. The visual handicap probably also did nothing for legible handwriting. This, together with her apparent lack of knowledge of either Dutch or German and her shaky Latin, creates a number of problems for the editor. Thus, Smith either wrongly noted down the title of Jozef Israel's painting Na de Storm as de Sturin (211), or else Dembski was unable to decipher her handwriting, though the solution to the puzzling "Sturin" can be found easily enough via a Google search. The text is peppered with explanatory square brackets, but quite a few of these are incorrect, and unfortunately not all of the errors can be laid at Smith's door. To give only a few examples, "uxori optissamae" is misspelled and does not translate as "the best wives" (183); "Mannen" does not translate [End Page 137] as "men," nor does "Manner" (156); "gartens" are not the equivalent of "gardens" (203); and "abort" does not mean "aboard" (186). Although Dembski conscientiously notes misspellings, he misses several. Thus, the...

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