The Letters of Margaret Butcher
Now what shall I tell you first? The days…have been so full of interests and fresh things that I know not where to begin. Suppose I say right here that I believe I shall be very happy here and also that it seems a post I can fit and having said that I’ll just write consecutively to give you as good an idea as possible of how we are placed. -- M …
Greenwor(l)ds
Greenwor(l)ds rewrites the literary history of Canada from a feminist ecological perspective through a series of essays that examine the lives and work of nine women poets. Using insights from fields of knowledge as disparate as history and biology, physics and philosophy, psychoanalysis and communications studies, these essays reflect the transdis …
Suitable for the Wilds
The plea was advertised in the British Medical Journal in February 1929: seeking "strong energetic Medical Women with post-graduate experience in Midwifery" for "country work" in western Canada. A young Dr. Mary Percy was intrigued. After graduating with degrees in medicine and surgery from the University of Birmingham in 1927, she had been searchi …
An Unsettled Spirit
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 …
The Eloquence of Mary Astell
The Eloquence of Mary Astell makes an important contribution to the knowledge and understanding of the important role that women, and one woman in particular, played in the history of rhetoric. Mary Astell (1666-1731) was an unusually perceptive thinker and writer during the time of the Enlightenment. Here, author Christine Sutherland explores her …
A Voice of Her Own
A Voice of Her Own profiles fifty-two ranch women from Western Canada. With this book, the editors have brought to light a little-discussed aspect of ranching: the valuable contributions of women in an industry traditionally thought of as the domain of men. These women range in age from their teens to their nineties, and across three provinces, but …
The Changing Tradition
Until very recently, the contribution of women to the history of rhetoric has gone unacknowledged. Current scholarship, however, reveals that traditional devinitions of the field have been too narrow, excluding the work of women rhetoricians. Research demonstrates that women hav indeed been involved in the field of rhetoric, almost since its incept …
Surviving in the Hour of Darkness
Surviving in the Hour of Darkness addresses the health issues - physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual - of black women, First Nations women, and other women of colour. The book is a collection of scholarly essays, case studies, personal essays, poetry, and prose written by over 45 contributors. It illustrates, through the voices of many women, …
Treasures
This is a book about memory and meaning; these texts bring to light the patterns of story and emotion that women have woven around the objects they have kept and treasured, objects which in the past may have seemed unimportant. These treasures contain and reveal each woman's life experience and act as vehicles for her values and for the development …
Unsettled Pasts
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. This collection aims to re-examine the West through women's eyes. It draws together contributions from researchers, scholars, and academic and community activists, and seeks to create dial …
The Madwoman in the Academy
An original and highly subversive critique of the academy by women affiliated with universities and colleges across Canada, The Madwoman in the Academy explores topics familiar to women working in academia around the world: the clash between family and work, the politics of academe, and the rifts between an academic career and political activism. C …
Lobsticks and Stone Cairns
In Lobsticks and Stone Cairns, over one hundred Arctic stories are told about adventurers, military officers, authors, guides, cultural heroes, police, traders, and even the occasional charlatan. While some of the biographies in the book are of people still active in the North, others tell stories from as far back as the sixteenth century. The subj …
The M Word
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 …
Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War
Through ear-splitting, thunderous explosions and fearful eerie flashes in the distance, the nurses of the Canadian Army Nursing Service in World War I waited for the inevitable arrival of wounded soldiers. At the Casualty Clearing Houses, they worked at a feverish pace to give emergency care for bleeding gashes, broken and missing limbs, and the de …
Tide Road
Shortlisted, Thomas Head Raddall Award
When Stella disappears, leaving her toddler and husband behind, her mother Sonia, a widowed farm wife and former lighthouse keeper, struggles to face the possibility that her daughter may not have slipped through the ice. She may have been pushed.
In a intensely memorable narrative with the deceptive pull of an …
Grace Helen Mowat and the Making of Cottage Craft
Knitting is a booming pastime, enjoying a resurgence of interest, spawning books, movies, a brisk online trade in wool and knitted goods — even trade fairs. In Canada, Cottage Craft has long held a strong reputation for its fine wool, dyed to the palette of the local landscape, and the fine craftsmanship of the women who weave and knit its qualit …
Sanctuary
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 …
Edge Effects
Reading Edge Effects, Jan Conn’s masterful eighth collection, is a little like looking at Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of real industrial wastelands; both visions are as gorgeous as they are terrifying, platforms for thought, even for activism, depending as they do on the energy of the viewer/reader for completion.
The Walking Tanteek
A CNQ Editors' Book of the Year
Does faith insist upon the spotless soul? Can intellectual integrity and an honest search for the holy in this world survive a collision with religious mania? Is heavenly forgiveness possible this side of the River Styx? In this boisterous, witty, manically paced novel, Maggie Prentice is resolved to find out, even if …
A Fit Month for Dying
A Fit Month for Dying is the third book in M.T. Dohaney's highly praised trilogy about the women of Newfoundland's outports. Fans of The Corrigan Women and To Scatter Stones will embrace this book, while those reading the author for the first time will discover her characteristic bittersweet humour. Tess Corrigan seems to be living the good life. S …
All the Gold Hurts My Mouth
Winner, 2017 ReLit Award
Katherine Leyton's fresh and vibrant debut collection takes on the sexual politics of the twenty-first century, boldly holding up a mirror to the male gaze and interrogating the nature of images and illusions.
Confronting the forces of mass communication — whether television, movies, or the Internet — Leyton explores the …
This Woman in Particular
What happens when an individual becomes the subject of many and divergent portraits?
“Biography,” says Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, “is a deceptive genre. Positioned between fact and fiction and elusive in its purposes, biography displays an individual life, an existence patterned by conventions that have also shaped the reader’s experience. …
Making Babies
Although the infant has been a consistent figure in literature (and, for many people, a significant figure in personal life), there’s been little attention focused on infants, or on their place in Canadian fiction, until now.
In this book, Sandra Sabatini examines Canadian fiction to trace the ideological charge behind the represented infant. Exa …
In Due Season
First published in 1947, In Due Season broke new ground with its fictional representation of women and of Indigenous people. Set during the dustbowl 1930s, this tersely narrated prize-winning novel follows Lina Ashley, a determined solo female homesteader who takes her family from drought-ridden southern Alberta to a new life in the Peace River reg …
The Widowed Self
How do older women come to terms with widowhood? Are they vulnerable or courageous, predictable or creative in dealing with this life challenge?
Most books about widows usually focus on younger women; this book interweaves the voices of older widows their experiences and insights to show how they have come to terms with widowhood and have recreated …
The Feminine Gaze
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 describe …
Map Worlds
Map Worlds plots a journey of discovery through the world of women map-makers from the golden age of cartography in the sixteenth-century Low Countries to tactile maps in contemporary Brazil.
Author Will C. van den Hoonaard examines the history of women in the profession, sets out the situation of women in technical fields and cartography-related o …
Profiles of Anabaptist Women
During the upheavals of the Reformation, one of the most significant of the radical Protestant movements emerged — that of the Anabaptist movement. Profiles of Anabaptist Women provides lively, well-researched profiles of the courageous women who chose to risk prosecution and martyrdom to pursue this unsanctioned religion — a religion that, unl …
The Thought House of Philippa
Suzanne Leblanc's The Thought House of Philippa transposes a theory of individuality into a stunningly reflective, sensuous and frank philosophical novel. Setting the chapters in the various rooms of the house Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna, Leblanc's novel lays out P.'s intensely emotional and intellectually acute way of see …
Going by the Moon and the Stars
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 …
Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada
Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada is the first book to examine how Laurence addresses decolonization and nation building in 1950s Somalia and Ghana, and 1960s and 1970s English Canada.
Focusing on Laurence’s published works as well as her unpublished letters not yet discussed by critics, the book articulates how Laurence and her character …
Literature as Pulpit
Nellie L. McClung (1873-1951) was an internationally celebrated feminist and social activist whose success as a platform speaker was legendary. Her earliest notoriety was achieved as a writer, and during her lengthy career she authored four novels, two novellas, three collections of short stories, a two-volume autobiography and various collections …
Memoirs from Away
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 …
Working in Women’s Archives
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 that …
Traditions in Contact and Change
"Traditions in Contact and Change" was the theme of the fourteenth quinquennial congress of the International Association for the History of Religions. This selection from 450 papers by scholars form all over the world address the theme.
Section One, "Indian Traditions and Western Interactions," treats subjects ranging from the flood story in Vedic …
Women Theorists on Society and Politics
Revolution, abolition of slavery, public health care, welfare, violence against women, war and militarism — such issues have been debated for centuries. But much work done by women theorists on these traditional social and political topics is little known or difficult to obtain. This new anthology contains significant excerpts not normally includ …
Voices and Echoes
“Every time we raise our voices, we hear echoes.” Jo-Anne Elder, from the Foreword
Through short stories, journal entries and poetry, the women in Voices and Echoes explore the changing landscape of their spiritual lives. Experienced writers such as Lorna Crozier, Di Brandt and Ann Copeland, as well as strong new voices, appear to speak to each …
Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley
Pioneers in life writing, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818 ), are now widely regarded as two of the leading writers of the Romantic period. They are both responsible for opening up new possibilities for women in genres traditionally dominated by men.
This volu …
The Surprise of My Life
“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 …
No Work Finished Here
When Andy Warhol's a, A Novel was first published in 1968, The New York Times Book Review declared it "pornographic." Yet over four decades later, a continues to be an essential documentation of Warhol's seminal Factory scene. And though the book offers a pop art snapshot of 1960s Manhattan that only Warhol could capture, it remains a challenging …
The Parent Track
The Parent Track provides an in-depth understanding of parenting in academia, from diverse perspectives—gender, age, race/ethnicity, marital status, sexual orientation—and at different phases of a parent’s academic career. This collection not only arrives at a comprehensive understanding of parenthood and academia; it reveals the shifting ide …
The Battle for Berlin, Ontario
In August 1914, Berlin, Ontario, settled largely by people of German origin, was a thriving, peaceful city. By the spring of 1915 it was a city torn apart by the tensions of war. By September 1916, Berlin had become Kitchener. It began with the need to raise a battalion of 1,100 men to support the British war effort.
Meeting with resistance from a …
Weaving Relationships
Weaving Relationships tells the remarkable, little-known story of a movement that transcends barriers of geography, language, culture, and economic disparity.
The story begins in the early 1980s, when 200,000 Maya men, women, and children crossed the Guatemalan border into Mexico, fleeing genocide by the Guatemalan army and seeking refuge. A decade …
Leo
Set in Santiago, Chile, three young friends form a bittersweet love triangle during the political upheaval surrounding President Salvador Allende’s assassination.
Told through Leo’s memories, the play travels through childhood, first friends, and first loves. Passion and poetry weave together in this story of innocence disappeared.
Haven’t Any News
“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 ph …
Erect Men/Undulating Women
Based on intensive study of human origin illustrations, responses from students and colleagues and research into reconstructive illustration and feminist criticism of Western art, this ground-breaking book traces the subtle ways in which paleoanthropological conventions have influenced and have shifted in the creation of these illustrations. Wiber …
Of God and Maxim Guns
The founding of the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria arose out of the enthusiasm of the young church in Jamaica. The first mission party arrived in Calabar in 1846 and settled into a routine of preaching, teaching, campaigning for social reform, ministerial training, and practising medicine. With the coming of the British Empire after 1890, a new gen …
Anthologizing Canadian Literature
The first collection of critical essays devoted to the study of English-Canadian literary anthologies brings together the work of thirteen prominent critics to investigate anthology formation in Canada and answer these key questions: Why are there so many literary anthologies in Canada, and how can we trace their history? What role have anthologies …
Women, Reading, Kroetsch
Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference is a book of both practical and theoretical criticism. Some chapters are feminist deconstructive readings of a broad range of the writings of contemporary Canadian poet-critic-novelist Robert Kroetsch, from But We are Exiles to Completed Field Notes. Other chapters self-consciously examine the histor …
Lorenzo Magalotti at the Court of Charles II
In the late 1660s the English court received a visitor from Florence—Lorenzo Magalotti, an intelligent, sensitive writer and diplomat with a passion for observation and description. Magalotti had come from a state governed by an absolute grand duke to a kingdom engaged in a fierce struggle for political liberty, and from a society in which the s …