Dear Miss Cowie: The Construction of Canadian Authorship, 1920s and1930s Victoria Kuttainen James Cook University ong before the recommendations of the Massey Report (1948–49), Lthe introduction of the New Canadian Library (1958), and the prolifera- tion of university courses on Canadian literature, a long forgotten school- teacher named Margaret Cowie was at work teaching it in her Vancouver classroom and assembling a library of Canadian literature for her school. Although the library itself has disappeared, the surprising list of titles collected by Miss Cowie, as well as the lively literary correspondence she left behind in fonds at the University of British Columbia, provides a remarkable snapshot of literary activity in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s. Morley Callaghan, Frederick Phillip Grove, A. M. Klein, Raymond Knister, Dorothy Livesay, Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, F. R. Scott, and Jes- sie Georgina Sime comprise a small star system of writers typically called upon by present-day university curricula to represent Canadian writing in this era. In spectacular contrast, the eighty-three Canadian writers with whom Cowie corresponded comprise a significantly larger universe of Canadian print culture in the process of expanding, stimulated by a grow- ing reading public, modernizing media, and emerging middlebrow tastes. Many of these writers shaped the terrain of writing in Canada before the canon, and more than a few published whole series of books that now ESC 39.4 (December 2013): 145–171 languish in obscurity despite achieving varying levels of national literary celebrity and prestige in their time. Their correspondence and careers offer refreshing insights into the literary history of Canada during this period Victoria Kuttainen and connect Canadian cultural activity to a broader cultural history of received her ba Honours the interwar period. Scholars of modernity have characterized the period and ma in English from between the wars as an epoch of major cultural transition. Ben Singer, for ubc before moving to instance, considers it a “striking explosion” of industrialization, urbaniza- Australia to study with tion, transportation, migration, mass communication, amusement, and the postcolonial research consumerism (19). Yet literary histories have characterized the 1920s and group at the University 1930s in Canada as barren, insular, and lacking in literary talent. The few of Queensland. Her works that have secured a place in the canon reveal the way retrospectives doctorate, which looked of the period overemphasize the impact of literary modernism, national- at Canadian, Australian, ism, or politicized narratives of the Depression at the expense of other and American short kinds of texts and authors widely read in their own time. fiction in a comparative Cowie’s expansive cast of literary correspondents worked actively framework was throughout the Depression and contributed a wide variety of literature. published as Unsettling They funded their writing careers in Canada or the U.S. as journalists, Stories by Cambridge academics, publicists, magazine writers, textbook authors, radio broad- Scholars Press in 2010. casters, screenwriters, or civil servants. They were folklorists, nature poets, She is Senior Lecturer animal fabulists, travel and adventure writers, and authors of masculine and Margaret and Colin historical and industrial romances or feminine coming-of-age novels Roderick Fellow of and sentimental verse. Their work was certainly variable in quality, but Comparative Literature taken as a whole it nonetheless indicates a much richer range of writing at James Cook University and cultural complexity than literary histories of Canada have generally in tropical Queensland. acknowledged. Margaret Cowie’s library of Canadian literature therefore Her research in progress suggests an urgent need to critically modify our understanding of literary focuses on the interwar culture of the interwar period in Canada. As Pierre Bourdieu explains in period, magazines, Distinction, literary work plays an instrumental role in, and is also affected travel across the Pacific, by, the larger social process of the assignment and contestation of cultural and late colonial worth; Cowie’s library and correspondence afford some insight into the modernity. Images can processes of contestation and exclusion in Canada. In considering the be viewed at www. wide range of Canadian writing included in Cowie’s library, and in placing transportedimagination. the work of this dynamic cultural period between the wars back into the com. context of its time, we can grasp a broader understanding not only of the circulation and reception of literary work in its own era but also of the historical construction of literary value. Fewer than a dozen of the eighty-three authors in Cowie’s correspon- dence have been featured in William H. New’s seminal History of Cana- dian Literature. More than that number are featured in Anne Innis Daag’s The Feminine Gaze: A Canadian Compendium of Non-Fiction Women 146 | Kuttainen Authors and Their Books, suggesting that the longstanding scholarly bias in favour of fiction in literary studies is one reason why a large sample of work in Cowie’s collection has been overlooked. Although the critical dismissal of non-fiction has been corrected in the recent past with the turn to life writing and autobiography studies, historical non-fiction remains under- studied despite its prominence on publisher’s lists in its time. But even more extensive revisions of Canadian literary history suggest additional reasons why these authors are in some cases now completely unknown. Scholars of Canadian literature such as Heather Murray, Carole Gerson, and Maria Tippett have undertaken extensive histories that have enlarged our understanding of print culture and publishing history in Canada. Nick Mount has examined the nationalist bias of Canadian literary criticism, which has overlooked work set outside Canada due to an assumed “topo- centric axiom” that has guided canon formation. He has further shown that commitment to this axiom has repressed in our cultural memory the historical circumstances that impelled many Canadian writers to relocate to the more lucrative and robust American print market. Lorraine York and Faye Hammill have separately appraised the relation between liter- ary repute and the market and have demonstrated a complex relationship in which literary success is often gauged by literary critics as inversely proportionate to market success. Further, Faye Hammill, Michelle Smith, and Candida Rifkind have offered recuperative understandings of mid- range and middlebrow material that was widely read in its own time yet dismissed until now as unworthy of scholarly attention due to an aca- demic bias in favour of non-sentimental, highbrow, and non-commercial prose. These studies have prompted reconsiderations of the processes of canon-making throughout the twentieth century that define the field today. My discussion of the Margaret Cowie Fonds will draw from this important body of revisionist literary scholarship to consider how many of these now obscure writers provide valuable insights into Canadian authorship and reading tastes as they were conceived in their own time, in the era immediately preceding Massey. I argue that Cowie’s collection is particularly valuable as a record of Western Canadian reading tastes and writing cultures when emerging literary associations in central Canada were beginning to shape public awareness of Canadian literature. Further, I show that the letters in Cowie’s correspondence offer rare glimpses into the way these authors operated as working writers and constructed their identities in complex ways in relation to the nation, celebrity, the market, and the literary field before the rise of CanLit as a sanctified and institu- tionalized literary category. Dear Miss Cowie | 147 Florence Nightingale School where Cowie taught in 1930s Vancouver. As Nick Mount has observed in his study of the diverse output and careers of another group of largely forgotten Canadian writers, the orderly proces- sion implied by chronological lists of representative greats in an anthology or university reading list hardly represents the disorder of literary produc- tion in its day. This disorder is succinctly captured in Cowie’s library, as her collected letters bear witness to a busily emerging literary culture that was, a decade after the turn-of-the-century expatriate exodus documented in Mount’s study, increasingly becoming organized and professionalized in Canada. Even still, Cowie’s correspondence reveals that CanLit was yet an uneven enterprise drawing from a variety of professional and amateur writers, not all of whom aimed to capture an elite literary readership and many of whom could not afford to do so. This was an era before protec- tionist measures were introduced in Canadian publishing, during the rise of Hollywood and mass communication, when the market was flooded by American books and magazines with which Canadian writers needed to compete. The introduction of compulsory schooling was only a genera- tion old, and the level of education had been raised to the mandatory age of fifteen only by 1912, university education was still for the elite, and the broadest market of Canadian readers was emerging from the expanding middle class. And while more of the interwar writers in Cowie’s collection were based in Canada than in Mount’s study of an earlier period when a career as a writer in Canada was