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[felis_ultharus]

I haven't been posting too much lately, but I continue to be alive. Work is chaos, and I almost feel guilty enjoying my lunch hour.

Morale is being sapped a little by the fact that with several of these courses, we know that we're bringng order to chaos in something that will probably spin back into chaos by the time next week is out.

Writing is going well, though this much culling is painful.

I've also been reading up on 19th-century Canadian women authors for my next historical post on Sunday, which is a disturbingly obscure subject -- disturbing because there were a huge number of them publishing a lot of material, much of it good, and even most specialists in Canadian literature I've met probably could not name four of them without looking them up.

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[frog-songs.livejournal.com]

So, I glanced at this post just as I was leaving work yesterday, and have been racking my brain for a fourth 19th-century woman author ever since. Like everyone else, I can come up with

- Susanna Moodie
- Catherine Parr Traill
- Pauline Johnson.

This elusive fourth (or morth) is driving me crazy, but I'm determined not to cheat. There's someone who's been on the tip of brain since yesterday afternoon, but I can't tell you who it is.

What I can tell you, though, is that we've got a long and proud tradition of ignoring 19th-century women writers: the first edition of the NCL's Poets of Confederation features only Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carmen, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G.D. Roberts. (I always pretend that Roberts' parents named him that so he could introduce himself as "Charles gee-dee Roberts," which would have been quite cheeky.)

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

A lot of it depends on the definition of "Canadian" and "author," of course. Since Traill and Moodie always make the cut, obviously we're not leaving out immigrants, and I'd extend "author" to cover poets, while some people think of that word as only meaning prose-writers.

Just glancing over the notes I made for the entry I'm making tomorrow in my historical blog, I come up with Canada's first local-born author (Marie Morin), the author of the first novel set in Canada (Frances Brooke), and the first canadian-born author to set a novel in Canada (Julia Beckwith Hart).

There's ls the poet Henrietta Prescott, Margaret Bennerbassett, M. Ethelind Sawtell. Suzanne Anne Curzon and Isabella Valencey Crawford were both much-anthologized poets.

(Crawford's loss is particularly tragic -- much of what she wrote beautiful, Pagan, mystical, and vaguely erotic -- and stands much better than the paeans to God, Empire, and Race that you get in a lot of women poets of the 19th century.)

Sadly, probably the best-known 19th century Canadian woman author is probably Maria Monk, a mentally-ill woman manipulated by a cabal of Protestants into fabricating wild stories about the goings-on in convents. It's still kept in print by American fundamentalist Protestants as anti-Catholic propganada.

All these women -- except occasionally Crawford -- were jettisoned when the Modernists came around. They argued that the work too Victorian, and of poor quality. They trimmed the 19th-century canon down to a small handful. Crawford was the only one to make the cut -- Moodie and Traill were kept alive more for historical than literary reasons -- and now Crawford's mostly forgotten.

The modernists also claimed the Victorians' was too derivative, and proceeded to derive their work from British and American modernists. Now the Postmodernists are getting rid of all the Modernist work as too derivative, and deriving all their stuff from American and French authors.

And still the cycle continues.

It's quite intriguing how few Victorians made the modernist's cut, and how vitually all of them are men. As I recall, Lampman could barely get published in his lifetime, and his work is not as impressive as much as the women's poetry which has been lost.

[frog-songs.livejournal.com]

My brain can relax, now: it was Crawford. I like Crawford - and I live in Peterborough! - and I couldn't remember her name.

I haven't much else to contribute to this, unfortunately. I appreciate the historical notes, though. It's an area I've been vaguely curious about, but have never researched.

Also, here is the thing: I love poetry. I would eat it for breakfast, if I could. I'm not overwhelmingly aligned with any particular historical period, but here is one thing I know about my preferences: Modernists rock my socks.