Our Little Life: Dressmaker Meet Cheesemonger

Our Little Life: A Novel of To-Day
J.G. Sime
London: Grant Richards, 1921
394 pages

Jessie Georgina Sime's debut novel begins with a tale of decline. In the eighteen-sixties, the residences at the confluence of O'Neill Street and Drayton Place were amongst the most desirable in Regalia. In the decades that followed, as the city's wealthy gravitated westward, the grand homes became less attractive. At the dawn of a new century they were bought on the cheap by a "Business Woman" who had them divided into small apartments:

The fact of the Buildings having begun life as a cluster of semi-detached dwelling-places explained certain odd constructions in the flats; also the many undesired intimacies—common taps of water on the landings, verandas that belonged to everyone and no one—that the inhabitants so reluctantly shared with one another. The Apartment House was the uncomfortable place it was because when it had been "made over" comfort had been the last thing in anyone's mind.

The Business Woman named the buildings the Penelope Apartments after herself, but soon found them too much to deal with. She signed the buildings over to a French Canadian in exchange a small sum to be followed by yearly payments. The French Canadian promptly flipped the property, thus setting off years of legal squabbling leading to further neglect.

The residents of the Penelope Apartments, known as "Penelopians," include labourers, drunkards, dope sellers, chorus girls, and prostitutes. They're interesting on the whole, but only two are fully drawn. What at first looks to be a novel about disparate and disreputable tenants and their interactions soon centres on the relationship between Katie McGee and Robert Fulton. 

Katie McGee lives in a modest first-storey flat on the Drayton side of the Penelope Apartments. A forty-six-year-old spinster, she makes a living as a dressmaker. Her workdays are spent in the homes of Regalia's upper-middle class, ripping apart last season's gowns so as to make use of the fabrics for the next.

Irish-born, Katie came to Regalia as a child, brought with older sister Mary by their widowed mother. Canada is the only home Katie can remember.

It is a familiar story.

Robert Fulton has a small flat on the third floor of the Penelope Apartments' O'Neill side. His story is less familiar and isn't revealed until fairly late in the novel. An English Cambridge graduate, he has somehow ended up serving at the butter and cheese counter of the Arundel Meat, Grocery, Fruit, Vegetable and Dairy Produce Market. He doesn't enjoy the work:

How Robert hated those prosperous women who came and shopped! How he detested the clipped intimations of their Canadian voices. He loathed their shrillness and their arrogance and their clumsiness of movement (it had taken his labor in the store to show him that women are more clumsy in their movements than men). He hated them from head to foot, and he felt certain that if he could see inside them he would hate them more.

Katie McGee is nothing like the women Robert serves. She'd never be able to afford the market's offerings. The same can be said of Robert. Both earn $1.50 for a day's work, the difference being that dressmaker's employers provide breakfast and lunch.

Their relationship begins in the backstory with an act kindness. Robert saw Katie struggling with a sack of coal for her flat and had insisted on carrying the burden.

Our Little Life is a portrait of a woman and man who would never known one another had they remained overseas. Katie's initial interest in Robert is as a possible partner; we first see her rushing to her flat so as to prepare a meal and herself for his arrival. She is older than Robert, Robert is "younger than his years," but still a girl can hope. A lonely woman drawn to the finer things in life, she looks up to a man who had not only received a fine education, but had once practiced a profession she had wanted for herself.

There is no envy, only awe.

It needs be said that Robert Fulton is nowhere near as interesting as Katie finds him. A bastard (historical definition), he was raised by a kindly woman who'd agreed to take on the task. Robert had wanted for nothing. Well-travelled, Robert chose Canada for his new home. He was provided with a substantial amount of money, which he promptly lost through a poor investment. Robert then looked to support himself as a schoolteacher, but for reasons left unsaid he resigned.

Before befriending Katie, he'd devoted his evenings to setting down his thoughts on immigration with the intent of producing a volume of essays. After befriending Katie, the better part of his evenings are spent in her small flat reading lengthy passages – featured in the novel –  as she listens intently, understanding little, but always ready with a compliment.

This is the novel's great flaw.

The reviewer in the Liverpool Daily Post (14 July 1921) puts it best:

Miss Sime has much to unburden herself of about Canadian conditions and Canadian folk. subjects on which Miss M'Gee is specially voluble, while Robert is writing a book upon them in intervals of leisure from the groceries counter. The novel is long in consequence. We might fairly retitle it "Our Little Life at Great Length." To deny it merit would be unfair to the effect produced by the amazing minutæ of which it is built up. It is not tedious; you may call it a feat of entertaining prolixity.

Our Little Life is set in the final fourteen months of the Great War, a conflict that has a surprisingly small presence. Robert, who had tried to enlist, had been been "turned down":

As he had come away from that rejection he had brought with him a mind torn in two: he had felt relief... and he had felt a miserable sense that he was being forcibly turned back from the only real duty that lay before him. This double attitude of his persisted. Had he been at the War, had he waited in the terrible trenches and rushed over No Man's Land into the German trenches opposite – he would undoubtedly have been miserable. But he could not have been more miserable than he was in the Arundel Store, feeling day after day that he was degradingly safe.

At one point, Robert accompanies Katie to a sort of going away party for Mac, a Penelopian he'd never met:

Robert and Mac looked at one another. Possibly the fact that Mac limped so that he was unable to go back to the front, while Robert had never got even so far as the drill-ground in the Campus may have had something to do with it. Possibly a certain half-bakedness together with the most complete certainty in himself that Mac had may have exasperated Robert unduly: undoubtedly the question that leaped to Mac's mind the instant he set eyes on Robert, "What's he doing here? What's he done for his country?" complicated the situation.

I risk making too much of these brief passages. As with Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's Mist of Morning (1919), read earlier this year, I was focussed on the march of time.

Our Little Life begins in the late autumn of 1917. The summer of 1918 is very hot. One evening, Robert suggests an outing Summer Park. He's heard customers at his counter talking about how much cooler it is there. They travel by there by streetcar moving first through a through French Canadian neighbourhood, then one populated by Eastern European Jews. Sicilian, Chinese, Syrian, Bulgarian, German, Polish neighbourhoods follow. He treats Katie to a chicken dinner and concert. It is the most magical evening of her little life.

The Armistice is to come, but not before the Spanish Flu.

Trivia I: The city in which Our Little Life takes place is referred to as "Regalia" ninety-seven times in the novel, but the Canadian reader will recognize it as Montreal. The façade slips on page 265:

By the time Beta's body had been brought back to Montreal to be buried and Mrs. Morphy's ground-floor across the court was empty and bare, it was May.

Not to worry, there's no real spoiler in the above.

Trivia II: Midway through Our Little Life, quite unexpectedly, one of Katie's clients presents her with two tickets to a talk by a touring Irish poet was is clearly modeled on W.B. Yeats. Sime first met the poet and dramatist as a girl growing up in Cheswick. In her privately printed memoir Brave Sprits (1952), she writes of  attending the poet's 1903 and 1914 Montreal lectures. 

Trivia III: The climax of the novel takes place on 7 November 1918, the day of the False Peace:

The Hamilton Spectator, 7 November 1917

Object and Access: Bound in blue boards with black type, my copy is the first UK edition. It was purchased in four years ago from bookseller in Arlington, East Sussex. Price: £17.50.

The front free endpaper features mysterious notations:

Any ideas?

The 1921 Grant Richards' British first was joined the same year by editions from F.G. Goodchild (Canadian) and Frederick Stokes (American). It would appear that none received a second printing. As I write, no copies of the 1921 editions are listed for sale online.

The good news is that the novel returned to print in 1994 when it was added to the Tecumseh Press Early Canadian Women Writers series. Used copies are just as uncommon as the Richards, Goodchild and Stokes editions, but you can purchase it today through this link to the publisher.

Between Exhaustion and Expression

Shackles
Madge Macbeth
New York: Waterson, 1927
282 pages

The first three pages of Shackles take the form of a letter written by the author to her friend Aimée. Do not read it before the novel itself! It contains a doozy of a spoiler.

Shackles is the sixth of Madge Macbeth's thirteen novels and has a novelist as its main character. This was almost enough for me to set it aside.

Are novelists really so common?

The novelist at the centre of Shackles is Naomi Lennox. She lives in a fairly comfortable house with barrister husband Arthur and semi-invalid relation Uncle Toby. There are no children, which given Arthur's nocturnal expectations is something of a miracle. 

Uncle Toby has recently returned from a trip south where he was surprised and extremely pleased to encounter people who new his niece's writing. He was even asked for an interview with one of the local papers! Arthur is not so impressed – in fact, is not impressed at all. A selfish, petulant, and stubborn man, Arthur resents the fleeting minutes his wife finds to steal away to her desk and is dismissive of the results.  

Shireen Dey is Naomi's closest friend. She too is a novelist – a very successful one. Her home life is quite different. Husband David, who she calls "Doolydear," not only takes care of the house but manages her career. He has recently sold the rights of one of her novels to the motion picture people. Lively, full of life, and aware of her limitations as a writer, I quite liked Shireen until she exposed herself as a racist. This occurs in an exchange which pretty much encapsulates Arnold's views of his wife's writing. Arnold speaks first:

"Man’s sphere throughout the ages seems to me to have been one of protection, provision. My simple philosophy is expressed in the idea of service. So far as I can see it, men have served their women faithfully – even to paying the supreme sacrifice in times of war. Is it too much to expect – say fifty per cent service in return?”

   “I admit,” Shireen answered, “that there are too many women in whom the commutual sense, the reciprocal sense, is lacking. They want to eat their cake and have it, too. Like the slaves in the South, they achieved freedom too suddenly. They don’t know how to use it. Mentally, physically, economically, they are parasites. They will not last. Think of the others, however; of the women whose mental development and chosen sphere of endeavour – whose creative ability – justifies them in demanding the identical type of freedom that is accorded men. What of the woman artist, musician, decorator, physician, lawyer? Suppose, to drive home my argument more clearly, you were a novelist, would you not claim the independence necessary to pursue your vocation?”

   Arnold observed that unless he were one of the great masters of literature, he could not imagine himself engrossed with the business of writing, at all. Comparatively few men, he ventured, devoted themselves exclusively to literature of that sort.

   “In other words,” Shireen cut in, “you mean to imply that they do something useful as a regular profession and scribble as a hobby or a pastime?”

   “That expresses pretty closely what I mean."

Would it surprise you to learn that Naomi has a lover? She's been seeing Hugo Main. A man of strong opinions on all sorts of things, he's really quite a bore. The best that can be said of Hugo is that he admires Naomi's intellect. Whether there is more to the attraction is uncertain; the two never share anything more than a kiss and an embrace. Hugo pressures Naomi to run away with him to New York, promising to be her own Doolydear.

Can she do it? Will she do it? What Naomi wants most is the freedom to work on The Book of the Hour, her second novel. She takes a bold first step one night remaining at her desk when Arnold expects her in bed. The second step comes in engaging a maid. What with the money brought in through her writing they can afford it. Besides, her hire, Jennie McQuaig, will free up time to be more productive and bring in more money.

It is impossible to read Shackles today without thinking of A Room of One's Own (1929). Is it not remarkable that the novel was published three years earlier? How has it escaped Virago's notice?

Macbeth writes in the book's opening letter:

Woman is passing through a cultural transition. Instinctively, she is bound to the old order of things; intellectually, she clamours for the new. And vacillating, she stands between them.

That doozy of a spoiler concerns the ending. Were it not for the letter I wouldn't have seen it coming. 

See if you don't agree.

Trivia: In the January of last year, I put together a list of the very best Canadian novels of the 1920s. I held it to nine because I'd yet to read Douglas Durkin's The Magpie (1923) and Barney Allen's They Have Bodies (1929); one of the two was sure to make the cut. I've since read The Magpie. Sure enough it made the list, rounding out the top ten. Shackles too deserves a spot. In adding it, I'm bumping Madge Macbeth's pseudonymous roman à clef The Land of Afternoon (1924).

The list as it now stands (in chronological order):

The Thread of Flame - Basil King

The Empty Sack - Basil King

The Wine of Life - Arthur Stringer

The Hidden Places - Bertrand W. Sinclair

Pagan Love - John Murray Gibbon

The Magpie - Douglas Durkin

"Cattle" - Edith Eaton

Shackes - Madge Macbeth

Blencarrow - Isabel Mackay

All Else is Folly - Peregrine Acland

I'm certain there'll be more changes. Despite my decades-old interest in Allen – see my reviews of The Toronto Doctor (1949) and The Gynocologist (1969) – I still haven't read They Have Bodies.

Object and Access: Yellowing pages bound in tan cloth, I purchased my copy in 2019 as part of a lot. It once belonged to Emma Bailey, but which Emma Bailey? The 1921 Canadian census records thirty Emma Baileys living in Canada. The 1931 census features twenty-seven, which narrows the field very slightly. 

As my copy is the first American edition, there is a possibility that Emma Bailey may not have been living in Canada. The true first edition was published in Ottawa in 1926 by Graphic. A Toronto bookseller has two copies for sale online, both with dust jackets, both at $250. So as to encourage a sale, I'm sharing an image of the one I'd choose.

My birthday is in twenty-four days.

The least expensive jacketless copy is listed at US$41.50. As I write, just one Waterson copy is listed for sale online. At US$72, it too lacks a dust jacket. 

Shackles returned to print in 2005 as part of the Tecumseh Press Early Canadian Women Writers Series. Twelve years later, Invisible Publishing followed with its own edition. Both are still available, meaning that after many decades out of print today's reader has two editions from which to choose.

Shackles can be read online here thanks to the good folks at the faded page.

Related posts:

The Nine Best Canadian Novels of the 1920s
The Great War and Its Discontents

Our Strangest Novel?
Still Strange (if a little less so)

A Woman Who Did

The Untempered Wind
Joanna E. Wood
Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1994
354 pages

In Henry James Morgan's Types of Canadian Women, published in 1903 by William Briggs, Joanna E. Wood is described as a "well known Canadian novelist."

She is not today.

She was not a half-century ago.

She was not a century ago.

"Meteor-like" is the word Barbara Goddard uses to describe Wood's career. In fact, it ended the very year Types of Canadian Women appeared.

The novelist was all of thirty-five.

Joanna E Wood was twenty-six when The Untempered Wind, her first novel, was published. Its heroine, Myron Holder, has had a child out of wedlock; she is "a mother, but not a wife," and so suffers the scorn of Jamestown, the small Ontario village in which she was born and raised. Myron's own mother is dead, as is her father. Her unloving grandmother is very much alive and shares a modest house with Myron and her baby boy.

When first published in 1894, The Untempered Wind proved a critical and commercial success, encouraging three printings, each featuring the same ten illustrations. The frontispiece was used on the cover of the Tecumseh edition:

Had I been involved in its publication, I would have chosen one of the illustrations depicting Myron. This is my favourite:

Still, I understand the selection. Myron may be the protagonist of The Untempered Wind, but more pages are given over to those so quick to pass judgement. Mrs Deans, the most prominent, leverages her employ of Myron as an act of sacrifice and charity: "I feel a duty to have her here, but it goes ag'in me, Mr. Long [the ragman] it does that; but there, we all have our cross and we must help along as well as we can." Other women of the village visit Myron's grandmother on the pretence of providing sympathy. Each hopes to be the one who uncovers the identity of the child's father, but not even old Mrs Holder knows his name.

Not everyone in Jamestown condemns Myron; some are too drunk to care, while others are oblivious to her situation. This reader was struck by young Bing White, an elfish lad who today's reader will recognise as displaying all the early interests and obsessions of a serial killer:

There was something hideously repulsive in this boy's secret cruelties, horrible to relate, sickening to contemplate. But the creatures he tormented, maimed, killed, knew neither anticipation nor remembrance; the "corporeal pang" was all.

A boy drawn to blood, including his own, Bing is unique in nineteenth-century Canadian literature, as is Jamestown. The village stands in stark contrast with the surrounding farmland as a place poisoned by an atmosphere of envy, greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy:

The Jamestown people, in making a pariah of Myron Holder, were not urged to the step by imperative feeling of hurt honor or pained surprise. Such faults as hers were not uncommon there; but never before had the odium rested upon one only. Besides, there had always been some "goings on" and some "talk" indicative of the affair. In Myron Holder's case, the Jamestown people had been caught napping. In such eases a marriage and reinstatement into public favor was the usual sequel, arrived at after much exhilarating and spicy gossip, much enjoyable speculation, much meditation upon the part of the matrons, and much congratulation that all had ended so well.

Myron is ostracised for not following that well-trod path. After a time, she comes to have a friend in Homer Wilson, by far the most intelligent person in Jamestown, whose ambitions have been crushed by manipulative, guilt-inducing parents. 

The Untempered Wind was first published the year before The Woman Who Did by fellow Upper Canadian Grant Allen. The latter, also a story of an unwed mother, was a succès de scandale. Wood's novel didn't raise as much stink, but it was a success. The three printings by original publisher New York's J Slewing Tait and Sons were followed in 1898 by an Ontario Publishing Company edition.

Together The Untempered Wind and The Woman Who Did stand as two of the most remarkable Canadian novels of the nineteenth century.

Neither was so much as mentioned in my CanLit classes.

Object and Access: A trade paperback with introduction by Klay Dyer, The Untempered Wind is the seventh volume in Tecumseh's essential Early Canadian Women Writers Series. I purchased my less than pristine copy eight years ago at London's Attic Books. Price: $2.23. It's available from the publisher at $17.95 (plus postage) through this link.

Current Literature, November 1894

The Tait and Sons first edition can be read online here, but this scan of the third printing – reproduced in the Tecumseh edition – is much easier on the eyes.

As of this writing, only the Tecumseh edition is listed for sale online.

Related post:

Getting to Know the Woman Who Did

Armand Durand; or, A Summer Project

Armand Durand; ou, La promesse accomplie

    [Armand Durand; or, A Promise Fulfilled]
Madame Leprohon [Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon;
    trans, J.-A.  Genand], 
Montreal: Beauchemin, 1894
367 pages

In her time, Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon – Madame Leprohon – was more popular with francophones than anglophones, so does it not make sense to tackle this, her third novel, in translation? I thought so. It was my summer project. That the season ended weeks ago speaks to my inabilities, and is no reflection on the novel itself. The story is simple and has a rushed, rather predictable conclusion – but it is deftly told and is populated by fully-drawn characters who live in a Quebec the author knew well.

The novel begins with Paul Durand, descendant of the earliest settlers of New France, who has come to inherit a large and profitable farm in "the seigneurie of — Alonville we will call it — on the banks of the St. Lawrence."* Handsome and hardworking Paul has put off marriage so as not to impose upon his mother, who had lived many, many years in the Durand family farmhouse... until she didn't.

I shouldn't be so flippant. Mère Durand is depicted as a fine woman. After her death, son Paul looks to be in no hurry to take a bride — but then he encounters Geneviève Audut. Newly arrived from France, delicate Geneviève is employed as governess to a pair of thoroughly dislikable children related to the seigneur. Geneviève herself is a relation —a poor relation — whom no one treats her particularly well. Her charges are the worst: "Mamma says we will never learn anything till we have a tutor, and that she would get us one to-morrow, only she does not know what to do with you. No body will marry you as you have no dot."

After overhearing this little shit, Paul proposes to Geneviève, which in turn sends the women of Alonville into a tizzy:

What could he see in her, indeed, a little doll-faced creature with no life or gaiety in her, to bewitch him in such a manner? What made him marry a stranger when there were plenty of smart handsome girls in his own village that he had known ever since they wore pinafores?

Much to their delight, Geneviève proves a disaster in keeping a farmhouse, but Paul Durand loves her to the end... which comes when she gives birth to the titular character. 

Again, I shouldn't be so flippant. Though I could see it coming, Madame Leprohon's description of Geneviève's death touches the heart.

Believing that his infant son is in need of a mother, Paul marries spinster Eulalie Messier, a plain-featured woman of good character, who had been generally recognized as Alonville's youngest spinster. His new bride loves and cares for the infant Armand Durand as her own, and Paul comes to love her as a result. Eulalie wasn't so old an old maid that she couldn't provide her husband with another son. They name him Paul, after his father.

And then, she dies.

I fear I've made Armand Durand seem gothic, when it is really a mélange of melodrama and literary realism. Its depictions of French Canadian traditions and society, which Mary Jane Edwards suggests is the reason behind Madame Leprohon's popularity, was just one element that kept me reading.

With Eulalie's death, focus shifts to the two Durand boys and their schooling at "the old Montreal College." Armand, the more retiring of the two, is the intellectual. Paul, though younger, is both literally and figuratively the bigger brother. He has confidence and brash. Poor Armand, so pretty and slight, becomes a target of his fellow classmates. "Miss Armand," as he's called, is bullied to a point at which he lashes out, bloodying the brute Rodolphe Belfond, after which the two become fast friends.

As the title suggests, Armand comes to take the place of the main character. Paul fis begins to fade with the end of their schooldays, returning to Alonville to help run the family farm. Armand remains in Montreal, working for a lawyer, with the goal of becoming one himself. It all makes sense, and works well until jealousy rears its ugly head. On visits to Montreal, Paul feels like a country bumpkin, and comes to resent the money their father sends to help support Armand. He begins a campaign of lies, implying that the funds are wasted on drink and dandyism. The scheming reaches its apex when Paul Durand pere lies in his deathbed as Paul fis intercepts letters addressed to his older brother. The upshot is that Armand Durand is disinherited.   

Madame Leprohon's greatest challenge in writing this novel must surely have had to do with events following the father's death. Armand marries Delima Laurin, his landlady's niece. Written this way, the decision seems so rash, and yet this reader understood the proposal of marriage and its timing. Sadly, Armand and Delima soon prove themselves ill-suited. 

I'll write no more for fear of spoiling things... and because I'm hoping you'll read it.

I found Armand Durand to be one the finest Canadian novels of the nineteenth-century.

Am I wrong?

Was something gained in translation?

* All quotes come from Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon's original text.  

Object: A fragile volume printed on thin paper, bound in embossed scarlet boards, my copy once belonged to the Bibliotheque de Chénéville. It was purchased earlier this year from a Gatineau bookseller. Price: C$19.41. I see no evidence that it was a discard. Should I be concerned?

Access: Armand Durand first appeared as a serial on 1 October 1868 in the Montreal Daily News. That same year, the novel was published in book form by John Lovell. That edition can be read — gratis — through this link at the Internet Archive.

The novel is in print today, with introduction by Loraine McMullen and Elizabeth Waterston, as part of Tecumseh's Early Canadian Women Writers Series. It can be ordered here, thorough the press.

Pay no heed to print on demand vultures. Take it from a Montrealer, this isn't Quebec:

The Tecumseh edition aside, I see no copies of Armand Durand — English or French —listed for sale online.

As might be expected, this once-popular novel has come to be the stuff of academe. The only copy I see in a public library can be found in Toronto.