Shelley Boyd - Garden Plots: Canadian Women Writers and Their Literary Gardens

Garden Plots

Canadian Women Writers and Their Literary Gardens

SHELLEY BOYD

McGill-Queens University Press
Montreal & Kingston London Ithaca

McGill-Queens University Press 2013

ISBN 978-0-7735-4126-9 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-7735-4156-6 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-7735-8870-7 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-0-7735-8871-4 (ePUB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2013

Bibliothque nationale du Qubec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

McGill-Queens University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Boyd, Shelley, 1974-. Garden plots : Canadian women writers and their literary gardens / Shelley Boyd. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7735-4126-9 (bound). ISBN 978-0-7735-4156-6 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-7735-8870-7 (ePDF). ISBN 978-0-7735-8871-4 (ePUB)

1. Canadian literature Women authors History and criticism. 2. Gardens in literature. I. Title. PS8101.G37B69 2013 C 810.9364 C 2013-900712-1

Book designed by Pata Macedo

Illustrations by Olavo Moe de Macedo Collins

Set in Minion Pro 11/14

For Mom and Dad, and my Saskatchewan roots

INTRODUCTION
Garden Plots

CHAPTER ONE
[T]ransplanted into our gardens:
Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill,
and the Backwoods Kitchen Garden

CHAPTER TWO
When Authors are Gardeners:
Susanna Moodies and Catharine Parr Traills
Figurative Plots

CHAPTER THREE
Then a living house: Gabrielle Roys
Domestication of the Bower

CHAPTER FOUR
A Saucer of Green: Carol Shields and Domestic Paradise

CHAPTER FIVE
Turning the Earth: Lorna Crozier the Gardener-Poet

This book was made possible through the guidance and support of many people. Foremost, I would like to thank Nathalie Cooke at McGill University for her insight and enthusiasm during the various stages of this research. I could not have asked for a better supervisor, colleague, and friend. It was my distinct privilege and pleasure to work with you. Thank you also to McGill-Queens University Press for their diligence and creativity, and especially to Philip Cercone for his patience and skill. The two anonymous reviewers comments proved invaluable in giving this plot direction and shape, as did Susan Glickmans fine pruning of the manuscript.

I would like to thank Catherine Hobbs, Lynn Lafontaine, Monique Ostiguay, Jean Matheson, and Helen Gillespie at Library and Archives Canada for their assistance with primary research in the Traill Family Collection and the Fonds Gabrielle Roy. Warm thanks are also due to Elizabeth Seitz at the University of Regina Library for her assistance with the Lorna Crozier archives. I acknowledge Library and Archives Canada for the materials reprinted from the Traill Family Collection and the Patrick Hamilton Ewing Collection of Moodie-Strickland-Vickers-Ewing Family Papers. I especially thank Franois Ricard for his kindness and generosity, as well as the (c) Fonds Gabrielle Roy for permission to reprint the Gabrielle Roy images and text. I also acknowledge the McGill University Rare Books and Special Collections for providing the illustration from Jane Loudons Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, and Barb Hall for the poster of the SATCO theatres production of The Sex Lives of Vegetables.

I am grateful to Lorna Crozier for permission to reprint archival material and excerpts from many garden poems published in Inside Is the Sky, The Garden Going On Without Us, Everything Arrives at the Light, Apocrypha of Light, and A Saving Grace: The Collected Poems of Mrs. Bentley. I also acknowledge Random House of Canada for granting copyright permission for the poems excerpted from The Blue Hour of the Day by Lorna Crozier. Copyright (c) 2007 Lorna Crozier. Reprinted by permission of McClelland and Stewart. I would like to thank Margaret Atwood and her publishers for permission for the following: portions of five poems from The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Reprinted by permission of Margaret Atwood. Available in the UK in Eating Fire, (c) 1998 O.W.Toad Ltd, published by Virago Press. Atwood, Margaret, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Copyright 1970 (c) Oxford University Press Canada 2005. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Dream 1: The Bush Garden and The Double Voice The Journals of Susanna Moodie by Margaret Atwood. Copyright (c) 1976 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Finally, I acknowledge the permission to reprint excerpts from Pumpkin: A Love Poem from Stone Hammer Poems 19601975 by Robert Kroetsch (Oolichan Books, 1975). Copyright (c) 1975 Robert Kroetsch. With permission of the author.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The Department of English at McGill University, the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, the Groupe de recherche sur Gabrielle Roy (in the French Language and Literature Department at McGill University), and the Max Bell Foundation provided generous financial support for this research, which I undertook during my doctoral studies and post-doctoral fellowship. Both the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (under the direction of Antonia Maioni and William Straw) and the Groupe de recherche sur Gabrielle Roy (under the direction of Franois Ricard, Jane Everett, and Sophie Marcotte) provided energizing, collegial communities, and I am grateful to have been a member of their teams.

Some of my research has appeared in English Studies in Canada 32.4 (2006): 189211, as Domestic Gardening: Gabrielle Roys Bower of Innocence in Enchantment and Sorrow; in Franoise Le Jeune, and Charlotte Sturgess, eds., Her Na-rra-tion, Womens Narratives of the Canadian Nation (Nantes, Canadensis series 3, editions du CRINI , 2009): 7187, as Carol Shields and the Quest for Paradise in Canadian Suburbia; and in Essays on Canadian Writing 84 (Fall 2009): 3557, as Transplanted into Our Gardens: Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill.

The pursuit of this research was enriched through many friends, including Tricia Antonini, Lorna Hutchison, and Medrie Purdham, who served as constructive sounding-boards; and Stphanie Roesler, who edited my translations of the French passages in chapter three. To my parents, Keith and Marilyn Boyd, thank you for your endless support and encouragement that made this garden possible.

Garden Plots