So, it was January the 18 and it was the middle of the night. And it was very, very cold. Snow was — we went just about knee deep in snow — And we went on the road going toward Posen, capital of Wartegau. And so we said, “Let’s take that direction.” Just going by the moon and the stars. (Katja Enns)

Going by the Moon and the Stars tells t …

How does the imagination entwine the shreds of memory of family, place and culture to root a self in the fluid experience of the present?

Daughter, wife, mother, teacher, writer and feminist academic, Helen M. Buss / Margaret Clarke has lived in many parts of Canada and writes from a life of multiple perspectives full of contradictory loyalties and …

“It’s an autobiography! If I tell you what’s in it you won’t read the book.” — Claire Drainie Taylor

Or would you? Maybe you’d be intrigued by the progression of a life begun as an unexceptional little girl born to a middle-class Jewish Canadian couple in a small prairie town who, at age sixteen, married a refined Englishman, and surv …

What is memory, and where is it stored in the body? Can a room be symbolic of a lifetime?

Memories are like layers of your skin or layers of paint on a canvas. In The Queen of Peace Room, Magie Dominic peels away these layers as she explores her life, that of a Newfoundlander turned New Yorker, an artist and a writer — and frees herself from the …

Xwelíqwiya is the life story of Rena Point Bolton, a Stó:lō matriarch, artist, and craftswoman. Proceeding by way of conversational vignettes, the beginning chapters recount Point Bolton's early years on the banks of the Fraser River during the Depression. While at the time the Stó:lō, or Xwélmexw, as they call themselves today, kept secret t …

A Woman of Valour is the biography of Marie-Louise Bouchard Labelle, a French-Canadian woman who found love with a priest thirty-three years her senior. Against all social convention, they lived, produced three children, and built a life together after fleeing their village.However, after several years together, Bouchard’s husband ultimately chos …

Offers an intriguing glimpse into the daily life of an average Toronto woman in the mid-nineteenth century.

Mary Armstrong’s diaries are a window into the daily life of a middle-class woman in a new and changing land, and a revealing account of life in early Toronto just before and after confederation. Her journals are one of very few published b …

To the very few women who were teaching in Ontario’s universities at the time of the great expansion in the 1960s, Flora Roy is a legendary figure. To many others, academic colleagues and former students, she has continued to be just that through all the years since....Flora Roy is unique among Canadian academics. She shepherded her department …

How did a privileged Victorian matron, newly widowed and newly impoverished, manage to raise and educate her six young children and restore her family to social prominence?

Mary Baker McQuesten’s personal letters, 155 of which were carefully selected by Mary J. Anderson, tell the story. In her uninhibited style, in letters mostly to her children, …

Persecuted as a Jew, both under the Nazis and in post-war East Germany, Johanna Krause (1907–2001) courageously fought her way through life with searing humour and indomitable strength of character. Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted is her story.

Born in Dresden into bitter poverty, Krause received little education and worked mostly in shops and fa …

January 21, 1995: Dorothy Joudrie is arrested for attempting to murder her estranged husband. Soon after, Audrey Andrews begins to write her book. Audrey and Dorothy had known each other as children, but the identification of Andrews with Joudrie goes beyond merely the accident of a childhood acquaintance. It has to do with being subjected to the s …

Olivia Cockett was twenty-six years old in the summer of 1939 when she responded to an invitation from Mass Observation to “ordinary” individuals to keep a diary of their everyday lives, attitudes, feelings, and social relations. This book is an annotated, unabridged edition of her candid and evocative diary.

Love and War in London: A Woman’s …

Borrowed Tongues is the first consistent attempt to apply the theoretical framework of translation studies in the analysis of self-representation in life writing by women in transnational, diasporic, and immigrant communities. It focuses on linguistic and philosophical dimensions of translation, showing how the dominant language serves to articulat …

On a May morning in 1939, eighteen-year-old Velma Demerson and her lover were having breakfast when two police officers arrived to take her away. Her crime was loving a Chinese man, a “crime” that was compounded by her pregnancy and subsequent mixed-race child.

Sentenced to a home for wayward girls, Demerson was then transferred (along with for …

Forty years ago, droves of young women migrated away from urban settings and settled in rural areas across North America. Many settled on the north coast of British Columbia, on Haida Gwaii or around Prince Rupert. Gumboot Girls tells the stories of thirty-four women, through their own eyes, as they moved from their comfortable city-dwelling surrou …

Every town has its celebrities, but Sechelt’s own unique and larger-than-life personality is wholesome enough to satisfy all of North America’s appetite for eccentrics. Asta Bergliot Solberg, or “Bergie,” as her friends knew her, lived life on her own terms. She climbed wild mountain trails to hunt for goats, demanded car rides from unsuspe …

In this much-anticipated second volume in the Extraordinary Women Anthology series, Diana French follows up on Gumption and Grit with more stories of the women who have contributed, or who are still contributing, to the vibrant mosaic that is the Cariboo Chilcotin. The area has more than its share of remarkable women, from educators to rodeo stars, …

In the early 1980s, Yvonne Maximchuk, a single mother of two, was living in Whiterock, BC, and making a living as a working artist and art instructor. Then she fell in love with Albert, a crab fisherman who fished the waters of Boundary Bay. Drawn to his seemingly idyllic life and her desire for connection with the natural world, Yvonne and her chi …

Voluptuous Pleasure is a collection of non-fiction whose title states that non-fiction does not exist. Sensuous and smart, ambiguous but incisive in their truths-these stories take you into brothels and bedrooms, kitchens and consciousness; they seduce you along the limits of non-fiction, making you question the veracity of anything you've ever rea …

Some people claim they'd like to walk away from their lives -- Shelley A. Leedahl had the nerve to do it. Was it selfishness, or self-preservation?

Drawing upon childhood memories, hikes, road trips, foreign travel, her self-imposed exile to a prairie village, fortuitous meetings with strangers, and her compulsion for starting over, again and again …

This Holocaust memoir crosses generations. In I Have My Mother's Eyes, Barbara Ruth Bluman chronicles her mother's dramatic journey from Nazi-occupied Poland to western British Columbia, where her legacy lives on. Bluman sets an urgent and intimate tone as she follows Zosia Hoffenberg from her genteel upbringing in Warsaw through the shock of the b …

Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II speaks to the work women did during the war: the labour of survival, resistance, and collaboration, and the labour of recording, representing, and memorializing these wartime experiences. The contributors follow their subjects’ tracks and deepen our understanding of the experiences from the imprints …

Mary Austin was a mayor’s daughter who expected to live an uneventful life in Canada. But when she said “I do” to Jim Endicott she found that she had “married China.”
Thrust into extraordinary circumstances, but undeterred by the political turmoil around her in China, Mary Austin Endicott determined she would achieve the goals she set for he …

“Ruby wrote letters home almost every week....She wrote anything that came into her head: about her children and Fred, her housekeeping, food, clothes, her friends, activities, schemes for making money, her dreams for the future....Her letters, nave, intimate and lively, were always optimistic or poignant. We’d read them to each other on the p …

Many Canadian women fiction writers have become justifiably famous. But what about women who have written non-fiction?
When Anne Innis Dagg set out on a personal quest to make such non-fiction authors better known, she expected to find just a few dozen. To her delight, she unearthed 473 writers who have produced over 674 books.
These women descr …

“The generation of 1930 in French intellectual life was unique in the gravity of the challenges they faced.” Simone Weil—the brilliant social and political theorist, activist, and spiritual writer—was one of an eminent company in the France of the 1930s who responded to these challenges. In her brief, remarkable life she wrote a host of ess …

“Where do you come from?”
When Vijay Agnew first immigrated to Canada people would often ask her “Where do you come from?” She thought it a simple, straightforward question, and would answer in the same simple, straightforward manner, by telling them where she had been born and where she grew up.
But over the years she learned that many …

Florence Nightingale’s Suggestions for Thought has intrigued readers from feminist-philosopher J.S. Mill (who used it in his The Subjection of Women) to the latest generation of women’s activists. Although selections from this long work have been published, Lynn McDonald is the first editor to work through the numerous surviving drafts of Nigh …

This book is the first major study of Canadian women filmmakers since the groundbreaking Gendering the Nation (1999). The Gendered Screen updates the subject with discussions of important filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta, Anne Wheeler, Mina Shum, Lynne Stopkewich, Léa Pool, and Patricia Rozema, whose careers have produced major bodies of work. It a …

In the 1950s, Anne Innis Dagg was a young zoologist with a lifelong love of giraffe and a dream to study them in Africa. Based on extensive journals and letters home, Pursuing Giraffe vividly chronicles the realization of that dream and the year that she spent studying and documenting giraffe behaviour. Dagg was one of the first zoologists to stud …

Not the Whole Story is a compilation of sixteen stories narrated by single mothers in their own way and about their own lives. Each story is unique, but the same issues appear again and again. Abuse, parenting as single mothers, challenges in the labour market, mental health and addictions issues, a scarcity of quality childcare, immigration and s …

What comes to mind when we hear that a friend or colleague is studying unpublished documents in a celebrated author’s archive? We might assume that they are reading factual documents or, at the very least, straightforward accounts of the truth about someone or some event. But are they?
Working in Women’s Archives is a collection of essays tha …

Florence Nightingale: An Introduction to Her Life and Family introduces the Collected Works by giving an overview of Nightingale’s life and the faith that guided it and by outlining the main social reform concerns on which she worked from her “call to service’’ at age sixteen to old age. This volume reports correspondence (selected from th …

Women’s letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical d …

Dead Woman Pickney chronicles life stories of growing up in Jamaica from 1943 to 1965 and contains both personal experience and history, told with stridency and humour. The author’s coming of age parallels the political stages of Jamaica’s moving from the richest Crown colony of Great Britain to an independent nation within the British Commonwe …

Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience is Carolyne Van Der Meer’s creative reinterpretation through short stories, poems, and essays of the experiences of her mother and other individuals who either spent their childhoods in Nazi-occupied Holland or were deeply affected by wartime in Holland. The book documents the author’s personal j …

A stunning personal account of Janet Merlo's twenty years of service in the RCMP, with an introduction by Linden MacIntyre. In 2012, Janet Merlo was among the first female RCMP officers to publicly allege she had experienced sexual harassment and gender discrimination while serving in Canada's national police force. The women kept silent for so lon …

Dorise Nielsen was a pioneering feminist, a radical politician, the first Communist elected to Canadaís House of Commons, and the only woman elected in 1940. But despite her remarkable career, until now little has been known about her.From her youth in London during World War I to her burial in 1980 in a heroís cemetery in China, Nielsen lived th …

In the first part of the twentieth century few women in western Canada had careers as artists—Pauline Boutal had three: 23 years as a fashion illustrator for the Eaton’s catalogue for the graphic design company, Brigden’s of Winnipeg, 27 years as the Artistic Director at the Cercle Molière Theatre and 70 years as a visual artist. Born in Bri …

Winner, Design Edge Regional Design Award
Shortlisted, Atlantic Independent Booksellers' Choice Award

Authentic. Original. Inimitable. Mary Majka was one of Canada's great pioneering environmentalists. She was best known as a television host, a conservationist, and a driving force behind the internationally acclaimed Marys Point Western Hemispheric …

Born in 1889, Gertrude Harding spent a boistrous childhood on a Welsford, New Brunswick, farm. She travelled to Hawaii to live with her sister, and, when her sister moved to London in 1912, Harding went with her. One day, from the top of a London bus, she saw a parade of women carrying large white posters. Attended by a policeman, they walked in si …

A CNQ Editors' Book of the Year

A Dropped Threads-style anthology, assembling original and inspiring works by some of Canada's best younger female writers — such as Heather Birrell, Saleema Nawaz, Susan Olding, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Carrie Snyder, and Alison Pick — The M Word asks everyday women and writers, some of whom are on the unconventi …

My Name Is Lola, contains the collected memories of Lola Rozsa - of her life and service to her family, her church, and her community as she and her husband, Ted, made their way from the tiny towns of the Depression-era, dust bowl southern plains to the burgeoning oil fields of Alberta in 1949. As Ted struggled to build his first seismic company, L …

"[Marshall's] work in responding to the challenge of exploring a little-known life should be an inspiration to other students of history … people across Canada will find it a pleasant way to become better acquainted with an attractive, interesting and unfamiliar contributor to our history." - Desmond Morton, McGill University

Give Your Other Vote …

Under the name of G.B. Lancaster, Edith Lyttleton wrote over a dozen novels and some 250 short stories, mostly narratives of romance and adventure set in the remote back country of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. She was New Zealand’s most widely read author overseas in the first half of the twentieth century, reaching millions of readers. Wr …

Originally written in the early 1970s, As I Remember Them is based on Jeanne-Elise Olsen's extraordinary recall of her childhood and youth spent in an isolated part of the Laurentians in the Lièvre River Valley in the early twentieth century.

Jeanne was the daughter of a Roman Catholic priest who was excommunicated from the Church because he marr …

The traditional mythology of the West is dominated by male images: the fur trader, the Mountie, the missionary, the miner, the cowboy, the politician, the Chief. Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West claims to re-examine the West through women's eyes. It draws together contributions from researchers, scholars, and academic and community activists, …

Crimes of passion, brutal slayings, infanticide, and revenge: here are eight gruesome and often tragic stories of women accused of murder. Many are little known or long forgotten, such as Mary Osborn, the first woman to be hanged in Upper Canada, executed for poisoning her disappointing husband. Read about the crimes and subsequent trials of Mary a …

From her time growing up in India and the Royal Court of Siam, Anna (made famous as the "I" in the movie The King and I) developed a fiercely independent nature that she brought with her to North America. As a well-known author, Anna toured America landing in Halifax where she single-handedly created an art school for girls - later to become the No …

Gwendoline Cramer was one of the 48,000 war brides transported to Canada by the Canadian government between 1942 and 1947. Many of them were escorted across the water and handed over to their husbands with nothing more than a handsake and a cookbook. Following her heart to rural Saskatchewan, Gwen felt like a fish out of water. She couldn't milk a …