http://www.bookswelove.com/donaldson-yarmey-joan/
Canadian Authors Past and Present
Canada celebrated its 150th
anniversary in 2017. To commemorate the occasion my publisher, Books We Love,
Ltd (BWL) brought out the Canadian Historical Brides Series during 2017 and
2018. There are twelve books, one about each province, one about the Yukon, and
one combining the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Each book was written by a
BWL Canadian author or co-authored by a Canadian and an international BWL
author.
Each province and territory of Canada has
spawned many well-known authors and my series of posts this year will be about
them-one or two from the past and one or two from the present, the present-day
ones being the authors of the Brides book for the corresponding province or
territory. The posts are in the order that the books were published.
Alberta
Henrietta Louise Muir
was born in Montreal on December 18, 1849, into a middle class family. When she
was twenty-six-years old she and her sister founded a Working Girls’
Association to provide meals, reading rooms, and study class for young women.
It became one of the first Young Women’s Christian Associations (YWCA) in
Canada. Henrietta and her sister also published a periodical titled The Working Women of Canada. It
highlighted the terrible working conditions of women in Montreal. The two young
women financed these two projects from money they earned as artists.
Henrietta married Dr. Oliver C. Edwards in
1876 and in 1883 they and their three children moved to Indian Head, Northwest
Territories, now the province of Saskatchewan. She continued to advocate for
women’s rights and when Dr. Edwards became ill in 1890, they moved to Ottawa,
Ontario. There, Henrietta took up the cause of female prisoners. In 1893, she
worked with the wife of the Governor General of Canada, Lady Aberdeen, to
establish the National Council of Women of Canada. They also founded the
Victoria Order of Nurses (VON) in 1897.
Dr. Edwards was posted as the medical
officer to the Blood Tribe in 1904 and they moved to Fort Macleod, Northwest
Territories, now Alberta. She wrote Legal Status of Canadian Women (1908)
about the legal problems she was trying to overcome for women. Near the end of the
First World War, 1914-1918, when supplies and moral were low, the Government of
Canada selected Henrietta Muir Edwards, as the only woman to be on an advisory
committee on how to bring in stricter conservation measures. This was the first
time that a woman had been appointed to review public policy with the
government.
Henrietta joined four other women’s rights
activists, Louise McKinney, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, and Emily Murphy, to
lobby the Alberta government for dower and matrimonial property rights for
women. They became known as The Famous Five. Henrietta wrote and had her second
book published, Legal Status of Women in Alberta in 1921.
The Famous Five joined together again to
fight the Persons Case in the late 1920s. Until then, women did not have the
same rights as men to hold positions of political power. The case, officially
known as Edwards v. A. G. of Canada,
fought for the right of women to be appointed to the Senate. In 1928, the
Supreme Court of Canada ruled that women were not considered ‘persons’
according to the British North America Act and therefore could not be appointed
to the Senate. The women took their appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy
Council in London, England. The council reversed the Court’s decision in 1929
and this opened the Senate to women, enabling them to work in both the House of
Commons and the Upper House.
Henrietta died on November 10, 1931 and was buried in Mount Pleasant Municipal
Cemetery, Edmonton. For some reason the memorial erected in her honour lists
her death as Nov 9.
William Patrick "W.
P." Kinsella was born on May
25, 1935, in Edmonton, Alberta. His first ten years were spent on a
homestead west of the city where he was homeschooled. His family moved into
Edmonton when he was ten and he started school in the fifth grade. His first
story won a YMCA contest when he was fourteen. After high school he worked at
various jobs in Edmonton, then moved to Victoria in 1967 where he drove taxi
and ran a pizza restaurant. Three years later he enrolled in writing courses at
the University of Victoria and received his Bachelor of Arts in Creative
Writing in 1974. He moved to Iowa and earned his Master of Fine Arts in English
from the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978.
Kinsella’s two favourite subjects for his stories were Indigenous
peoples and baseball. While in Iowa, Dance
Me Outside, a collection of stories as told by a young Cree boy, was
published in 1977. It describes life on a native reserve in Alberta. W.P.
returned to Alberta and taught English at the University of Calgary until his
writing career took off. In the mid-1980’s, he moved to White Rock, B.C.
Kinsella won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship award and the Books
in Canada First Novel Award for his most famous baseball novel, Shoeless Joe (1982). It was also made
into a movie titled, Field of Dreams
in 1989 starring Kevin Costner. Another collection of Indigenous short stories,
The Fencepost Chronicles, (1986) earned W.P. the Stephen Leacock
Memorial Medal for Humour in 1987.
Box Socials (1991) combines
baseball and life in rural Alberta in the 1940s. That same year Kinsella
received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of
Victoria. In 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Kinsella's eight books of short
stories about life on reserves were the basis for the 1994 movie Dance Me Outside and the CBC television
series The Rez, which aired on CBC
Television from 1996 to 1998.
In 1997, W.P. Kinsella was struck by a car and suffered a head injury.
He lost his ability to concentrate as well as his sense of taste and smell.
Unable to write his own stories he did keep in the writing community by writing
book reviews. He was awarded the Order of British Columbia in 2005 and was
presented with the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.
In March 2010, Kinsella’s unpublished manuscript, Butterfly Winter, won Winnipeg publisher, Enfield and Wizenty’,
Colophon award. They published the novel in September, 2011, fourteen years
after his accident.
Kinsella spent the last years of his life in Yale, a small village along
the Fraser River northeast of Vancouver. He had suffered from diabetes since
the 1980s and in failing health he opted for the assisted dying provisions of
Bill C-14. He passed away on Friday 16, 2016 at 12:05pm.
Book 1 of the Canadian Historical Brides Series:
Brides of Banff Springs (Alberta) - Victoria Chatham - January 2017
Victoria (Vicki) Chatham was born in Bristol, England and now
lives near Calgary, Alberta. She grew up in
an area rife with the elegance of Regency architecture. This, along with the
novels of Georgette Heyer, engendered in her an abiding interest in the period
with its style and manners and is one where she feels most at home.
Vicki mostly
writes historical novels but now and again will tinker with contemporary
romance. Her stories are laced with a little mystery to keep her characters on
their toes and, of course, in the end love has to conquer all. Cold Gold (2012), On
Borrowed Time (2014) and Shell
Shocked (2014) are the three books in her Buxton Chronicles series set in
the early 1900s. She switched time eras for her next book Loving That Cowboy (2015) which is a contemporary novel that takes
place in Calgary during the Calgary Stampede.
Apart from her writing, Victoria is an
avid reader of anything that catches her interest, but especially Regency
romance. She also teaches introductory creative writing. Her love of horses
gets her away from her computer to volunteer at Spruce Meadows, a world class
equestrian centre near Calgary. She goes to movies often and visits her family
in England when she can.
She is a long time member of Romance Writers of America and her local RWA
chapter, CaRWA, the Calgary Association of Romance Writers of America.
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