In 1830-31, Susanna Strickland transcribed and helped to edit two West Indian slave narratives at the London home of her friend Thomas Pringle, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. Published by Pringle as pamphlets in 1831, the narratives of Mary Prince and of Ashton Warner were used in the struggle to abolish slavery in the British Empire.

The two narratives were also crucial to the evolution of Strickland's creative life after her marriage to John Moodie later that spring and their emigration to Canada in 1832. Susanna Moodie became the author of Roughing It in the Bush (1852), a seminal autobiographical work about settling in Upper Canada that would establish her as one of Canada´s most important early writers.

This critical edition brings the two slave narratives together for the first time, complete with introductions and notes, as well as accounts of their initial reception and critical history. Included are key letters of Pringle to Moodie, and some of their respective 'slavery poetry', as well as material relating to the lawsuits that followed the publication of The History of Mary Prince. The inclusion of The Narrative of Ashton Warner, never before republished, enables important new insights into slavery in Saint Vincent and on the genesis of Mary Prince as well as into their role in Moodie´s own development as a writer.

Thirty Years of Storytelling gathers together fourteen works of short fiction penned by Ethelwyn Wetherald (1857-1940), a prolific writer who made her mark in the world of Canadian letters during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Published originally in Canadian and American newspapers and magazines between 1880 and 1912, the stories in this volume reveal Wetherald as a writer who approached short fiction as a significant form of social reflection, one which allowed her to interrogate people and circumstances with both humour and compassion. In her stories, Wetherald takes up such wide-ranging topics as the social expectations surrounding women, Christian behaviour and brotherhood, competing notions of diet and health, psychic phenomena, and the persuasive appeal of advertising. Love in various forms, and its lighter and darker aspects, emerges as an abiding theme for Wetherald. A versatile writer, Ethelwyn Wetherald's literary accomplishments extended to poetry and journalism. The Appendix to this volume provides a sampling of her journalistic work, a field of writing in which she explored many of the concerns she took up in her short fiction. This edition of Wetherald's short fiction also includes annotations for the short stories and the journalism and an Introduction by Janet B. Friskney, which provides an overview of the author's life and work. The volume is completed by a Selected Bibliography compiled by Helgi Kernaghan, the researcher who has, over the course of many years, painstakingly searched out Wetherald's bibliographic record. The Selected Bibliography contains both primary and secondary sources related to Wetherald.

Sime believed that the reason the contemporary novel was so "utterly useless and unreal" was its refusal to embrace and to represent change, instead maintaining an anachronistic relation to the past by "depicting a past state of things as if it were existing today." Sime chose as her example of obsession with "past states" common literary treatments of women, explaining that while the novel almost inevitably deals with gender on some level, it often fails to impart any idea of women's reality.

In the last decade, scholars have come to see Georgina Sime (1868-1958) as an exciting and important early twentieth-century Canadian writer. A Place of Bare Necessity, a collection of Sime´s short fiction and dramatic work, adds to the richness and variety of extant Canadian writing of the early twentieth century and is of interest to scholars of women, of modernism, and of Canadian Literature alike.

Sime´s work in A Place of Bare Necessity articulates the complexities of the era of the New Woman: sexual harassment in the workplace, the manifold implications of the "Woman Question," the many forms of loyalty and love, the cost of abortion, the price of connection, the meaning of nation, and the loss of home in wartime. While its form introduces questions about morality and genre and their relationship to the edifice called Canadian Literature, its content makes it difficult to ignore pressing social questions about women in urban Canadian society, about the nuances of their lives and their economies, and about power and agency in turn-of-the-century Canada. Written in an era of Canadian boosterism and amid critical yearnings for a wholesome kind of nationalism in published work, Sime´s fiction sketches a picture of Canada as "a place of bare necessity," a stern and unyielding place in which its citizens are uneasily and inequitably entering the modern world.

Of special interest, too, is Sime´s dramatic work in which she ponders the boundaries between the new public world of paid office work for women and the private world of intimacy. A Place of Bare Necessity presents a broader range of Georgina Sime´s work and talent than has been easily available to date. Her writing is edgy, boldly about the physical side of love, about unsentimentalized love, and about the shifting poles of personal and public relationships in "modern" Canada and in a new world of technology that seemed to herald limitless possibility for women.

    Macbeth´s fifth novel, Shackles, a pivotal work of early twentieth-century Canadian literature, recounts a vibrant period of first-wave feminism in Canada. First published in 1926, Shackles revovles around a middle-class Canadian woman, Naomi Lennox, and her search for acceptance and respect as a writer. Besides the protagonist´s struggle for the autonomy in which write Shackles portrays many of the major issues in Canadian public discourse of 1900-1930: the rise of the maternal feminist, the New Woman´s role in Canadian society, the conflict between free thinkers and the established churches, power relations in heterosexual unions, contradictions and tensions between domestic and public spaces, and appropriate roles for working- and middle-class women. This new edition of Madge Macbeth´s controversial novel includes an overview of her life and work in the Introduction, Explanatory Notes, a Bibliography, reviews of the first edition, and three key articles by Macbeth.

Armand Durand, first published in 1868, is a novel about French-speaking Quebecois, by an author whose first language was English and who wrote for such English-language publications as The Literary Garland, the Family Herald and The Pilot. It tells the story of two male characters yet it is written by a woman. It described boys' life on a seigneury farm, although its author, born into an Irish family, had spent her own youth in the warehouse district of seaport Montreal; describes college life and professional training- although its mid-century author was of course excluded from such realms and experiences by her sex. Rosanna produced a novel every year or so throughout her marriage, while also producing thirteen babies, (and caring for the eight that survived infancy). Armand Durandhas an authentic ring. It is a moving, disturbing, and realistic novel.

In Shenac's Work at Home, first published in 1866, we read of Shenac MacIvor, a Scottish-Canadian farm girl whose courage and determination allow her to save the family farm and to provide for her ailing mother and siblings after the untimely death of their debt-ridden father. The same Scotch spirit that animates Glengarry's annual festivales in Maxville and supports its unique historical museum in Williamstown endures in this and other novels of Margaret Murray Robertson. Through her story of Shenac, a valiant domestic heroine, Robertson fashions a compelling chronicle of family life in Canada's oldest and most distinctive Scottish-Canadian community.

"Roland Graeme: Knight", fittingly subtitled "A Novel of our Time", dauntlessly tackles the most pressing social and economic issues of the 1890s. The first Canadian novel to address directly the need for labour reform, it advocates the program and cause of the Knights of Labour, seeking to resolve social and economic inequities through education, benevolence, and good will. Issues entwined in its primary plot include temperance and alcoholism, Christian activism (the social gospel), and the obligation of middle-class women to participate actively in social reform.

Duncan believed that one of the defining aspects of modern fiction is directly related to gender: the attempt to portray a new kind of heroine, substituting an active, thinking subject for the passive, instinctual object of patriarchal fiction. In her column of October 28, 1886 in The Week, Duncan deplores the limited exalted sphere to which women are relegated as heroines of sentimental fiction and complains that such characters are simply static devices for the forwarding of the plot, "the painted pivot of a merry-go-round."
Elfrida Bell, the "daughter of today," is an attempt at a realistic picture of a career female artist of the 1890s, who rejects marriage and even love as inimical to her ideal of achievement.

The vague outline of an ironical omniscient narrator in The Imperialist becomes in Cousin Cinderella one of Duncan's most engaging and sympathetic female characters, Mary Trent; her self discovery as narrator of the text is subtly created as a moment of self-recognition for the Canadian reader.
None of Duncan's previous narrators are as emphatically Canadian as Mary Trent; none are called upon to represent Canada, to serve as "samples" of the Canadian "natural product" of which Senator Trent is so proud, "finished" not by London or New York society, but by Canadian life.

An incisive social critique of the puritanism and narrow-mindedness that cripples the spirit of the nineteenth-century village of Jamestown, it is also a novel that underscores the ambivalence and heightened anxieties informing the politics of marriage and sexuality during this period. With its sympathetic treatment of a young unmarried mother's struggle to survive social ostracism and psychological cruelty following the birth of her son, The Untempered Wind challenges the abstract notions of female virtue and honour that had emerged as key concerns during the legislative bickering over the Charlton bill only a few years earlier.

As a reflection on immigrant work in Canada, What Necessity Knows is a significant, intelligent work. The novel rose well above the average fictional fare of the day and recognized the seriousness of its author's project and is an important novel about women.
The questions of identity posed by Dougall's narrative are of greatest consequence for the two main female characters, Sissy/Eliza and Sophia. Though their backgrounds and experiences may differ, both women struggle with the problem of establishing and maintaining their personal integrity as individuals.

For all that she played no part in the administration of British India, the memsahib as wife, mother and mistress has figured prominently in the complex mythology of that society. In fiction and non-fiction alike, the memsahib has been portrayed as heroine, martyr, and villainess. Sara Jeannette Duncan, on the contrary, concerned herself with the mundane life of the ordinary memsahib. It is her distinctive achievement that she combines entertaining craftsmanship with an absence of melodrama. Her Helen Browne, Duncan convinces us, is what most memsahibs really were like.