Verse on this Christmas Day by daughter of Southern Ontario Jean Blewett from her debut collection, Heart Songs, first published 1897 by George N. Morang.
Prince Caspian, by C S Lewis
1 hour ago
Showing posts with label Blewett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blewett. Show all posts
25 December 2025
13 September 2025
Laura Secord at 250: What is Good and Brave
Laura Secord was born 250 years ago today. She was the very first figure in Canadian history I knew by name, though family lore has it that I referred to her as "Laursecord." As a toddler, I was given a Laura Secord truck. My mother was a dedicated Laura Secord customer.
I was an adult before discovering that the company bearing her name has nothing to do with the woman or her family, nor had I been aware that she born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. That town has no monument to Laura Secord, which is not surprising as she played a key role in the American defeat in the War of 1812.
I was an adult before discovering that the company bearing her name has nothing to do with the woman or her family, nor had I been aware that she born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. That town has no monument to Laura Secord, which is not surprising as she played a key role in the American defeat in the War of 1812.
In this land adverse to mythologizing, Laura Secord's name is legend. Much verse has been written in her honour, most of it in the nineteenth century, much of it quite long. My favourite is this relatively short piece from the last century found in Jean Blewett’s Poems (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922).
LAURA SECORD
I search the pages of our history over
For a courageous one whose name would stand
For staunchest patriot, and for truest lover,
And prove the same by deed done for the land;
And my heart thrills, for ’tis a woman bears it,
You’ll find it, marble carved, on Laura Secord’s grave;
And you, and I, and every woman shares it,
The right to stand for what is good and brave.
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06 December 2019
The Twenty Best Book Buys of 2019
Never has there been a year like this. I visited few used bookstores, ignored library book sales, spent no more than a couple of hours perusing online offerings, and yet somehow came up with the greatest haul of my fifty-something years.
The riches were so many and so great that the pristine copy of Wilson MacDonald's Out of the Wilderness pictured above was overshadowed. Fellow collectors will envy me for owning a scarce, unsigned copy – though it does bear the signature of previous owner Healey Willan. I'm assuming it came from the composer's library. It is now part of mine.
Because this has been such an extraordinary year, my annual ten best buys list has been expanded to twenty. As has been so often the case, I begin with Grant Allen:
Romance
Grant Allen
London: Raphall Tuck &
Sons, [1893]
With A Terrible Inheritance, this ranks as one of the very worst Grant Allen books I've ever read. But, oh, isn't it attractive! After winning this copy in an online auction, I came upon a second. I'm offering it to the first person who expresses interest.
Grant Allen
New York: Appleton, 1898
If the opinion of Allen biographer Peter Morton is anything to go by – and it is – this novel of a young Canadian caught up in the slave trade will disappoint. The Incidental Bishop is longer than An Army Doctor's Romance, and is considerably less attractive, but I won't let that dissuade me from giving it a try.
Jean Blewett
Toronto: Morag, 1898
The first of the poet's four volumes of verse, this second edition is inscribed. Blewett's verse has featured on this blog many times ( 'Queen Victoria', 'Easter Dawn', 'Thanksgiving Song', 'Thanksgiving Prayer'). This collection promises further riches.
Found in a Copper
Cylinder
James De Mille
New York: Harper &
Bros, 1888
A "lost civilization" novel read thirty-six years ago in my very first Canadian literature course. Does the fact that I've read nothing more by its author mean anything?
Wistaria
Onoto Watanna
[Winnifred Eaton]
New York: Harper &
Bros, 1902
Eaton's third novel, penned in the early days of her ill-fated first marriage to Bertand Babcock. Academics suggest that he helped in its composition. They're probably right, which is not to say she wasn't better off without him.
Onoto Watanna
[Winnifred Eaton]
New York: Harper &
Bros, 1904
My obsession with the Eatons continues. They were the most remarkable and unusual family in Victorian Montreal. I fear my soul will not rest until someone writes a proper account of their trials and accomplishments.
Javis Warwick
[Hugh Garner]
Toronto: News Stand
Library, 1949
The Governor General's Award-winning writer's "novel about the Abortion Racket." Five years ago I helped return Waste No Tears to print as part of the Ricochet series, but had ever so much as seen a copy of the scarce News Stand Library edition.
Anne Hébert
Westmount, QC: Éditions
de l'arbre, 1942
Anne Hebert's first book, this copy is inscribed by her loving father, poet and literary critic Maurice Hébert:
À mes chers amis Monsieur et Madam Bandwell, ce livre d'une petite canadienne que j'aime beaucoup.
André Langevin
Montreal: Le Cercle du
livre du France, 1956
Poussière sur la ville and Une Chaîne dans le parc are two of the best novels I've ever read. They're also the only two Langevin novels that are available in translation. I'm looking forward to tackling this one. Signed by the author.
Marge Macbeth
New York: Henry
Waterson, 1927
The fourth novel by the Ottawa writer whose scandalous roman à clef The Land of Afternoon (1927) so entertained five years ago. The main character in this one is a writer!
of John J. MacDonald
John J. MacDonald
Ottawa: Ru-Mi-Lou,
1928
Better known as "James MacRae," youngest of the Four Jameses, my interest in this poet began when we moved to St Marys, Ontario, in which he twice lived. I spent more than a decade hunting for a book – any book – by the man. This year, I found one.
Margaret Millar
London: Gollancz, 1955
The first UK edition of the novel for which Millar won the 1956 Edgar Award. James Bridges' 1964 television adaptation is recommended; Robert Glass's 1986 perversion is not.
James Moffat [James Moffatt]
London: Everest, 1977
A novelization of a movie I've found unwatchable. This was yet another money job from a man better remembered as the celebrated skinhead novelist "Richard Allen". Featuring eight glossy pages of stills!
Passages in an Eventful
Life
Mrs. Moodie
New York: De Witt &
Davenport, [1854]
Now seems a good time to confess that I've never read one of Mrs Moodie's novels. On the other had, I've read two or three essays on Flora Lyndsay. The novel features in my first book, Character Parts, as a result.
Frederick Niven
London: Collins: 1935
Forgotten Frederick Niven's twenty-first novel (I think). For the reason laid out here, chances are I'll never read this tragic story of an acclaimed portrait painter and his three lady loves. The book makes the list because I like the way it looks and remember the thrill of uncovering it in a dank antique store in rural Ontario .
Prophesy
John Richardson
Montreal: John Lovell,
1868
The fourth and earliest edition I own. Will 2020 be the year I finally read this novel of the War of 1812?
Probably not.
Fall of Chicago
Major Richardson
New York: Pollard &
Moss, 1888
A later edition of John Richardson's 1850 novel of the Siege of Fort Dearborn during the War of 1812. Though popular in its day – and for years thereafter – the work didn't save Richardson from death through malnutrition.
Margaret M. Robertson
London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1883
The penultimate novel by the woman who gave us Christie Redfern's Troubles, the teariest work in all of Canadian literature. Robertson scholar Lorraine McMullen considers By a Way She Knew Not the author's very best novel. I'm betting she's right.
Mrs. Annie G. Savigny
Toronto: William Briggs,
1888
A Victorian novel "FOUNDED ON FACT" by a woman whose previous books include An Allegory on Gossip.
How could I resist!
William A. Stephens
Toronto: Rogers &
Thompson, 1840
Included here because it is now the oldest book of Canadian verse I own. In Anxious Allegiances: Legitimizing Identity in the Early Canadian Long Poem (McGill-Queen's, 1997), Dr C.D. Mazoff dismisses the "Hamilton" as "rather poorly written." Here's hoping he's wrong.
Alan Sullivan
New York: Century,
1928
One of several Sullivans purchased that had once been part of the man's personal library. This novel is particularly interesting in that it has a pencilled notation by the author. Some unknown hand went after it with an eraser, but I bet I can discover what it says.
Related posts:
07 October 2018
Jean Blewett's 'Thanksgiving Song'
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| From Canadian Poets, John W. Garvin, ed (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart) |
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| From Jean Blewett's Poems (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922) |
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23 July 2018
The Promise of a Man, a Mother in So Much Pain
Blencarrow
Isabel Mackay
Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1926
307 pages
The author's final novel, published two years before her death, Blencarrow begins in a sunny, lighthearted manner:
Euan Cameron, aged twelve, sat upon the fence and bent a darkling eye upon his father at the woodpile. The woodpile was in the Cameron's back yard, and the Camerons' back yard was in Blencarrow, and Blencarrow was a small, but exceedingly important, town somewhere around. So now you know exactly where Euan sat.Do not be deceived. Blencarrow fits in with Mackay's other novels: The House of Windows (1912), dealing with child abduction and worker exploitation; Up the Hill and Over (1917), about mental illness and drug addiction; and The Window-Gazer (1921), in which post-traumatic stress disorder and racism figure.
(I've yet to read Mackay's 1919 novel Mist of Morning.)
Named after the fictitious town in which the action is set (see: Woodstock, Ontario), Blencarrow focusses on four children as they grow into adulthood. Euan is the least interesting. I blame his family.
All three boys are attracted to Kathrine Fenwell. She isn't the prettiest girl in Blencarrow – that would be her sister, Gilda – but she has by far the strongest character. Kathrine needs this as the daughter of the town drunk. Owing to his good looks and pedigree, Blencarrow had once considered her father, Gilbert Fenwell, a man of great promise. Shortly after the death of his own father, the respected Colonel Fenwell, Gilbert took his healthy inheritance to the big cities, where he invested in "Big Business." He married Kathrine's mother, Lucia, and began construction of what was to have been the grandest house in all of Blencarrow:
It was not so much a house as a half-house, the front half benign-existent save as a tracing on a blue-print. The back half, arrested abruptly in its normal growth, had remained fixed, as by some strange enchantment, in all the ugliness of outraged proportion. At first, scaffolds had decorated it, but, bit by bit, the scaffolding had disappeared and nothing had taken its place. No steps below, no eaves above, broke the wide flatness of is face. The front door was not properly a front door, but a door leading into a hallway that was not there. The windows were not windows really, but glassed-in entrances to dining-rooms and drawing-rooms – which lived and had their being in a fourth dimension.The lengthy description, one of my favourite Mackay passages, ends:
It stood well back in its neglected garden, the ghost of something once new and fresh and promising, On its strange, flat face was a negation of all hope. It was a house which had given itself up.The odd appearance of Gilbert Fenwell's house, "the town's only curiosity," serves as a reminder that Big Business "wiped him off the financial map as a child rubs out a name on a plate." Work stopped,
Blencarrow had given it up also. While the scaffolding still stood, Blencarrow had pointed it out to strangers as "the unfinished Fenwell place." But this they did no longer, for a thing which never will be finished is the most finished thing of all.
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| The Globe & Mail 14 December 1926 |
If only he hadn't.
Gilbert doesn't figure nearly so much in Blencarrow as Kathrine, Euan, Garry, and Con-of-the Woods, but his influence on the plot is greater. As a young child, Gilda is sent away to live with her aunt after having being beaten by Gilbert. Her forehead bears a scar that she hides with her long red hair. He takes his failings out on his family. He beats Lucia. He beats Kathrine. His poison is pervasive. All too real, I can't think of another character like him this early in our literature, nor can I think of anything similar to this exchange between Kathrine and her mother:
"Gilda doesn't care for anyone in any way – except you, of course," she added hastily, as she saw the tightening of her mother's face.A remarkable passage in a remarkable novel, it leads me to ask again how it is that we've forgotten Isabel Mackay.
Lucia laid down her sewing. Into her eyes had come the strange blank look which Kathrine had grown to dread.
"No," she said softly. "You can't have it both ways. If Gilda cares for no one, why would she care for me? And that is justice, too. I hated her you see."
"You hated Gilda?" – in wonderment.
Lucia nodded. "Before she was born I hated her. I would have denied her life if I could. I had come to hate life so! To pass it on seemed a horrible thing... horror... all horror –"
Bloomer: As in life, there's humour to be found in even the darkest of tales. Blencarrow is no exception. Its plot is governed by effects wrought of domestic violence, and yet there are chapters reminiscent of Stephen Leacock. My favourite involves the decision of the Presbyterian Ladies' Affiliated Societies of
"Keep your mind clear as long as it is clear... Fill it with the spiritual things you love. Hold fast through everything to the decision you have made. Nothing can conquer you – except yourself."Object and Access: A bland green hardcover sans dust jacket (which I've never seen), as far as I know it's the only MacKay book to be attributed to "Isabel Mackay" and not "Isabel Ecclestone Mackay." I purchased my copy in 2013 from bookseller Grant Thiesen. Price: US$7.99. In reading it, I came across this bonus:
"Oh, I think I've got myself well in hand," said Garry cheerfully.
The Thomas Allen edition was a split-run with Houghton Mifflin. It appears there were no others. Blencarrow can be found at Library and Archives Canada and sixteen of our university libraries. The Woodstock Public Library excluded, Canada's public libraries fail us.
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21 May 2018
The Queen is Dead
Verse for Victoria Day, composed by Jean Blewett upon news of the monarch's death. This version is taken from The Cornflower and Other Poems (Toronto: Briggs, 1906).
QUEEN VICTORIA
1837
The sunshine streaming through the stained glass
Touched her with rosy colors as she stood,
The maiden Queen of all the British realm,
In the old Abbey on that soft June day.
Youth shone within her eyes, where God had set
All steadfastness, and high resolve, and truth;
Youth flushed her cheek, dwelt on the smooth white brow
Whereon the heavy golden circlet lay.
The ashes of dead kings, the history of
A nation's growth, of strife, and victory,
The mighty past called soft through aisle and nave:
"Be strong, O Queen; be strong as thou art fair!"
A virgin, white of soul and unafraid.
Since back of her was God, and at her feet
A people loyal to the core, and strong.
And loving well her sweetness and her youth.
1901
Upon her woman's head earth's richest crown
Hath sat with grace these sixty years and more.
Her hand, her slender woman's hand, hath held
The weightiest sceptre, held it with such power
All homage hath been hers, at home, abroad,
Where'er hath dwelt a chivalrous regard
For strength of purpose and for purity,
For grand achievement and for noble aim.
To-day the cares of State no longer vex;
To-day the crown is laid from off her brow.
Dead! The great heart of her no more will beat
With tenderness for all beneath her rule.
Dead! The clear eyes of her no more will guard
The nation's welfare. Dead! The arm of her
No more will strike a mighty blow for right
And justice; make a wide world stand amazed
That one so gentle as old England's Queen
Could be so fearless and so powerful!
Full wearily the sense of grief doth press
And weight us down. The good Queen is no more;
And we are fain to weep as children weep
When greedy death comes to the home and bears
From thence the mother, whose unfailing love
Hath been their wealth, their safeguard, and their pride.
Related posts:
09 October 2016
Jean Blewett's 'Thanksgiving Prayer'
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| From Jean Blewett's Poems (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922) |
Related posts:
27 March 2016
'Easter Dawn' by Jean Blewett
Jean Blewett's Poems
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922
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