Clara Thomas – författare

Anna Jameson is best known for her 1838 publication, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, the product of her brief visit to the country in 1836-7. Her contemporaries knew her as an influential literary critic, art historian, and advocate of an improvement in the status of women. Mrs. Jameson’s life was as wide-ranging and varied in its attachments and interests as were her works. Through her husband, later attorney General and first Vice-Chancellor of Upper Canada, she met members of London’s literary circle in the 1820s. Her friends included Ottilie von Goethe, the poet’s daughter-in-law, the Brownings, Lady Byron, and Fanny Kemble.

Clara Thomas assembles the complex patterns of Anna Jameson’s life and assess her work in a sensitive portrait of a memorable woman and her time.

William Arthur Deacon was an intellectual patron and prophet in Canadian writing. For forty years, as literary editor of Saturday Night (1922-8), The Mail and Empire (1928-36), and The Globe and Mail (1936-60) he contributed vast amounts of time and energy to building a readership and a sympathetic climate for Canadian writers and writing. His correspondence put him in touch, as no other reviewer before him, with virtually every English- and French-Canadian author of his time.

Based on his correspondence, books, and review columns, the biography views Deacon’s life in terms of this involvement and in the context of the cultural and political forces of his time. Deacon’s early years as a lawyer, his self-imposed literary apprenticeship, and his break with the law as a profession concurred with the sense of mission and destiny that were part of his Methodist family background and his personal theosophical beliefs. Coming to Toronto in 1922, he quickly established himself as the country’s premier literary reviewer and poured his energies into that role. In that decade he also published Pens and Pirates, Poteen, The Four Jameses, and the appreciative monograph Peter McArthur.

Deacon’s dismissal from Saturday Night and the Depression years tempered his zeal and broadened his awareness beyond literary horizons, although they were still the focus of his energies. His nationalism and pacifism were articulated in My Vision of Canada (1933). He also found himself more aware of the importance of literary community as he became deeply involved in the survival of Canadian writers and publishers. Deacon’s years with the Canadian Author’s Association, first as member, then as Toronto branch president, and finally as national president, witnessed the establishment of the Canadian Writers’ Foundation, the Governor-General’s Awards, the Standard Writers’ Contract, and the recognition by the federal government of special tax arrangements for Canadian writers.

The list of those who enjoyed Deacon’s friendship and support reads like a who’s who of Canadian literature, and his associations with French-Canadian writers after the Second World War broadened the cultural awareness of his readers.

His service to both reader and writer and to the culture on which both depend was without parallel – as this volume vividly reveals.

This new volume of the Literary History of Canada covers the continuing development of English-Canadian writing from 1972 to 1984. As with the three earlier volumes, this book is an invaluable guide to recent developments in English-Canadian literature and a resource for both the general reader and the specialist researcher.

The contributors to this volume are Laurie Ricou, David Jackel, Linda Hutcheon, Philip Stratford, Barry Cameron, Balachandra Rajan, Robert Fothergill, Brian Parker, Cynthia Zimmerman, Frances Frazer, Edith Fowke, Bruce G. Trigger, Alan C. Cairns, Douglas Williams, Carl Berger, Shirley Neuman, Raymond S. Corteen, and Francess G. Halpenny.