Charlotte Gray- Mrs. King: The Life & Times of Isabel Mackenzie King; Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill

I decided to do a double post for these ones, as they are both by Charlotte Gray, and both are histories of major women in Canadian history. As I stated when I wrote about Reluctant Genius, I really quite enjoy Charlotte Gray's biographies. Canadian history, as all of my international students last summer assured me, is really boring and dull. I'm not sure how much I agree with that, but I do enjoy leaning about it through the lives of interesting people more than I enjoy reading history books. Reading about women is even better, for their experiences are ones that often get forgotten in the writing of history.

I was especially interested in reading Sisters in the Wilderness because of how central Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill are to my field of work, which is modern Canadian poetry. The Bush Garden, Northrop Frye's collection of essays about Canadian art, which I believe was the last book that I blogged about, takes its title from the writings of Moodie. Margaret Atwood uses the two extensively as characters in her poetry, and the whole trope of the threatening and inhuman Canadian landscape throughout Canadian literature essentially begins with them. I often find myself reading Anne Wilkinson's "green order," her attempts to create a green world which she then transforms into, as her way of speaking against Moodie and Parr Traill's visions of the Canadian landscape and her way of humanizing it. Aside from all of that, I wanted to know more about what exactly they did experience when they, two cultivated English ladies, arrived in a Canada that was essentially untouched by humanity. I can't imagine what I would do if I had to go through what they did--giving birth alone in a log cabin, living on potatoes for the whole winter, not being able to clothe or properly educate your children--but Gray makes it vividly imaginable. It also fascinates me that neither Moodie or Parr Traill allowed the hardships of their lives to diminish the need that they felt to write. I'm considering trying to formulate a PhD dissertation around the subject of motherhood and writing in Canada, and these two are the prime example of the ways in which it can be done.

Mrs. King I picked up because I was enjoying Gray so much that I wanted to continue reading her. I vaguely remembered hearing something about William Lyon Mackenzie King's Oedipal complex when I was in school, but that was about all I knew about Mrs. King. Let me tell you--this woman was quite something. Her father was William Lyon Mackenzie, the famous rebel, her husband was useless, and her son was the Prime Minister of Canada. Out of all of these men, she was the type to attach herself to the one who could do the most for her; hence, her strange relationship with her son. From the letters that they exchanged, F.R. Scott and Dennis Lee's poems about Mackenzie King sound about accurate; she used to show him her underwear for his approval, and I don't know how much times have changed, but from today's perspective, that's just strange. It was quite an interesting book though, and I'm definitely going to find more by Gray, as reading her is an enjoyable way to learn.