Discovering Lily Lewis: A Canadian Journalist and New Woman

Discovering Lily Lewis: A Canadian Journalist and New Woman Peggy Martin University ofSaskatchewan I n Se ptem ber , 1888, t w o yo u n g C a n a d ia n jo u r n a l ists, Sara Jeannette Duncan, originally from Brantford, Ontario, and Lily Lewis, of Montreal, headed west on the c p r , beginning a trip that would take them to points in western Canada, to Japan, India, Egypt, and eventu­ ally to England. Both had obtained commissions to send regular articles to prominent newspapers in eastern Canada, writing under already well-known pseudonyms: Duncan as “Garth Grafton” for the Montreal Daily Star and Lewis as “Louis Lloyd” for the Toronto paper The Week. Neither returned to Canada to live. Duncan settled in India and has been increasingly recognized for her novels, stories, and sketches, her first published work being A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World By Ourselves, a partially fictionalized account of the world tour. Lewis has been almost entirely forgotten or misremembered as Duncan’s fictional “Orthodocia.” According to Canadian bibliographer Henry Morgan, Lewis lived in Paris following the tour, at least until 1912, and continued to publish a variety of work. Almost nothing has been known about her personal life, however, and her work prior to and fol­ lowing the tour has received no critical attention. In the pages that follow, I begin to redress that neglect. ESC 30.2 (June 2004): 129-150 Peggy Martin currently holds a term position as Assistant Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Saskatchewan. Her areas of specialization include both late nineteenthand late twentiethcentury Canadian women’ s writing. She has published on Alice Munro’s fiction, and has recently completed a book-length volume on Lily Lewis that is under consideration for publication. I became interested in Lily Lewis when I discovered just how absent she was from sources of information about Canadian women writers of her time, and several years ago began a dissertation project hoping to learn something about Lily Lewis’s life and recover as much as I could of her later writing. Duncan’s and Lewis’s accounts of their journey in the Star and The Week, respectively, were easily accessible when I began my project. Also readily available were thirty-three sketches by Louis Lloyd published in The Week between November 1887 and September 1888 under the heading “Montreal Letter,” a regularly-appearing column in which Lloyd describes and comments upon people, places, and current culture in Montreal. The following entry from Henry Morgan’s Men and Women ofthe Time, published in 1912, describes Lily Lewis’s career as an author as she would have described it to him: Rood, Mrs. Lily, author, D. late John Lewis, Surveyor of Cus­ toms, Montreal b. and d. there; wrote for The Week and other Can. Publications, under the nom de plume of “Louis Lloyd”; went round the world and subsequently wrote descriptive articles about the journey; later, went to Egypt with the Princess Gortchakow-Stonrdza, a daughter of the Russian Chancellor, going up the Nile to Dongola, where no white woman had ever been before; published an account of this expedition in a French review; has written for other newspa­ pers and mags, in Paris and London, including Gagliani’s {sic) Messenger, the Paris Temps, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Budget, London World, London Times and St. James Gazette; also the Boston Transcript and N.Y. Bookman in Am.; published a remarkable character sketch of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, late Presdt. of the New Salon (1895), and since then a little book of Japanese sketches; m. Roland Rood, s. Prof. Ogden Rood, Columbia Coll., has lived for many years at Paris.— 9 Quai Voltaire, Paris, France. 1912.1 In what has proved to be the only critical commentary about Lily Lewis that I have encountered, Marian Fowler, in Redney: A Life of Sara Jean­ nette Duncan, and Thomas Tausky, in Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist ofEmpire, refer briefly to some of Lewis’s articles from the world tour in conjunction with their critical and biographical writing about Duncan. 1 A similar, but not identical, entry for...