BREAKING NEW GROUND The First Generation of Women to Work as Professional Authors in English Canada (1880-1920) by Linda E. Quirk A thesis submitted to the Department of English in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen‘s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada October 2011 Copyright © Linda E. Quirk, 2011 Abstract In the later decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, large numbers of Canadian women were stepping out of the shadows of private life and into the public world of work and political action. Among them, both a cause and an effect of these sweeping social changes, was the first generation of Canadian women to work as professional authors. Although these women were not unified by ideology, genre, or date of birth, they are studied here as a generation defined by their time and place in history, by their material circumstances, and by their collective accomplishment. Chapters which focus on E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), the Eaton sisters (Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna), Joanna E. Wood, and Sara Jeannette Duncan explore some of the many commonalities and interrelationships among the members of this generation as a whole. This project combines archival research with analytical bibliography in order to clarify and extend our knowledge of Johnson‘s and Duncan‘s professional lives and publishing histories, and to recover some of Wood‘s ―lost‖ stories. This research offers a preliminary sketch of the long tradition of the platform performance (both Native and non-Native) with which Johnson and others engaged. It explores the uniquely innovative ethnographic writings of Johnson, Duncan, and the Eaton sisters, among others, and it explores thematic concerns which relate directly to the experiences of working women. Whether or not I convince other scholars to treat these authors as a generation, with more in common than has previously been supposed, the strong parallels revealed in these pages will help to clarify and contextualize some of their most interesting work. i Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding and I am grateful for research fellowships provided by the Bibliographical Society of America and the office of the Graduate Dean at Queen‘s University. Over several years of work on this project I have accumulated a debt of gratitude to many people. Whatever value may be found in these pages is due, in no small part, to their kindness and advice. Thank you to my advisors, Tracy Ware and Laura Murray, and to each of the members of my committee for your time, your generosity, and your stimulating contributions. Thank you to Leslie Ritchie for making it possible for me to consult materials in the British Library for this project. Thank you to the many librarians and archivists who have gone the extra mile for me, particularly Carl Spadoni, Sandra Alston, Eric Swanick, and the Inter-Library Loans staff at Queen‘s University. Thank you to Gwendolyn Davies for the happy suggestion that I investigate Joanna Wood. Thank you to Cheryl Cundell for your good advice and for always listening, always encouraging. For a thousand things, I want to thank Linda Alderson, Allison and Carey Grierson, Jan Brown, Tracie Bell, Janet Walther, Robert Dellio, Arnold Borsutzky, and Kathy Goodfriend. Finally, I want to thank Alex Grierson and Eric Grierson and my former students at both Queen‘s University and Seneca College; watching you grow and learn and re-imagine the world is an endless source of joy and inspiration. ii Table of Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements ii Table of Contents iii Chapter 1: Introduction: A Groundbreaking Generation of Professional Authors 1 Chapter 2: E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) on the Stage and on the Page 26 Chapter 3: Locating the Eaton Sisters (Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna) in Canadian Literary History 77 Chapter 4: Mass-Market Reformist Writings by Joanna E. Wood and Her Contemporaries 105 Chapter 5: Sara Jeannette Duncan‘s Transnational Success 143 Chapter 6: Conclusion 196 Works Cited-Consulted 201 Appendix A 244 iii Chapter 1 Introduction A Groundbreaking Generation of Professional Authors In the later part of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, a group of Canadian women changed the face of authorship in Canada and the shape of Canadian society. This was a ―mob of scribbling women,‖1 a mob which refused to be silenced in the manner that previous generations of women had been, and they confronted the dogmas of their age with clarity of vision and sometimes remarkable persuasiveness. They performed a wide range of social interventions, but perhaps their most radical act was that, once they found their voices, they insisted that their contributions had real and concrete value. These were not the first Canadian women to receive pay for their writing, but earlier examples were the exception rather than the rule. This was the first time that large numbers of Canadian women were consistently able to demand pay for their words, and the best of them managed to sustain themselves by the pen for significant periods of their lives. Many of these women knew and helped each other, but they did not function as a cohesive group with a single perspective or set of goals. Some of their commonalities have been explored in scholarly studies of selected subsets of the group. In Silenced Sextet, Carrie MacMillan, Lorraine McMullen, and Elizabeth Waterson examine the careers of a sextet of authors who were popular, successful, and well respected during 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s 1854 complaint about ―that damn‘d mob of scribbling women‖ has been re- imagined by scholars who speak from a very different perspective. Hawthorne was not was not writing about Canadians, but, as Lorraine McMullen points out in her introduction to the groundbreaking collection of essays Re(dis)covering Our Foremothers (1990), ―he could have been. There was certainly a mob of women writing in Canada in the nineteenth century, a much larger mob than is generally appreciated‖ (4). 1 their lifetimes, but who are largely forgotten today: Rosanna Mullins Leprohon (1829- 1879), May Agnes Fleming (1840-1880), Margaret Murray Robertson (1823-1897), Susan Frances Harrison (1859-1935), Margaret Marshall Saunders (1861-1947), and Joanna E. Wood (1867-1927). In The Woman‟s Page, Janice Fiamengo examines the ―intellectual ferment, questing spirit, rhetorical assertiveness, and moral confidence that marked women‘s reformist writing in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, when a significant number of Canadian women began to speak publicly on questions affecting the nation‖ (4). In a detailed chapter on each author, Fiamengo examines the rhetoric of Agnes Maule Machar (1837–1927), Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861–1922), E. Pauline Johnson (1861–1913), Kathleen Blake Coleman (1856–1915), Flora MacDonald Denison (1867–1921), and Nellie L. McClung (1873–1951) in an attempt to illuminate each writer‘s self-construction and her use of persuasive strategies. If we go further, and treat this group of women writers as a generation – unified not by ideology, genre, or date of birth, but by time and place, by their material circumstances (closely related to gender), and by their collective accomplishment – a set of common themes and characteristics emerges. Their writings endorse a range of sometimes contradictory ideologies, but as a group they were politically savvy and engaged. Part of a larger group of women who were stepping out of the shadows of private life and into the public world of work and political action, these authors were self- conscious about their public roles. The chapters which follow focus on Johnson, the Eaton sisters (Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna), Wood, and Duncan, treating these In the twenty years since this collection appeared, scholars have studied selected authors but little work has been done on the great ―mob of scribblers.‖ 2 authors as more or less representative and exploring the interrelationships among them and the other members of the group. This generation amassed a remarkable number of firsts for Canadian women. Duncan, for example, was the first Canadian woman to be employed as a full-time journalist with a major newspaper, initially with the Washington Post and later with the Toronto Globe. Saunders was the first Canadian author to sell over one million copies of a book (Waterston, ―Introduction‖ iii; Gerson, ―Margaret‖ 328). Coleman was ―the first accredited woman war correspondent‖ (MacMullen 2). Edith Maude Eaton (1865-1914) was the first author to advocate for denigrated Chinese communities across North America. Sarah Anne Curzon (1833-1898) established her reputation as one of Canada‘s first female historians, at the same time that she deliberately recovered the first Canadian heroine,2 with the publication of her play Laura Secord, The Heroine of 1812 in 1887. Despite their accomplishments, most of the women in this group were largely forgotten until they were recovered by the foundational scholarship of Carole Gerson, Gwendolyn Davies, Barbara Godard, Lorraine McMullen, Thomas Tausky, Sandra Campbell, and countless others. Authors and activists, this generation of women was able, as Fiamengo observes, to put women at the very centre of public discourse in a way that they had not been before, and would not be again for much of the twentieth century (Woman‟s 28). These authors grappled with a wide range of issues from temperance to poverty, from education to health care, from nationalism to colonialism to racism, and they were leaders in groundbreaking organizations established to demand legal rights for animals, children, 3 and the working poor. Active in the period from 1880-1920, this generation struggled to gain property rights and suffrage for women, and they laid the groundwork for the famous person‘s case.3 McClung, who outlived most of the women in this group, was able to reflect back on their collective accomplishment in her second autobiographical work, The Stream Runs Fast: My Own Story (1946): ―In Canada we are developing a pattern of life and I know something about one block of that pattern.