Dear Miss Cowie: The Construction of Canadian Authorship 1920s-30s

ESC 39.4 (December 2013): 145–171

Long before the recommendations of the Massey Report (1948–49), the introduction of the New Canadian Library (1958), and the prolifera-tion of university courses on Canadian literature, a long forgotten school-teacher named Margaret Cowie was at work teaching it in her Vancouver classroom and assembling a library of Canadian literature for her school. Although the library itself has disappeared, the surprising list of titles collected by Miss Cowie, as well as the lively literary correspondence she left behind in fonds at the University of British Columbia, provides a remarkable snapshot of literary activity in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s. Morley Callaghan, Frederick Phillip Grove, A. M. Klein, Raymond Knister, Dorothy Livesay, Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, F. R. Scott, and Jes-sie Georgina Sime comprise a small star system of writers typically called upon by present-day university curricula to represent Canadian writing in this era. In spectacular contrast, the eighty-three Canadian writers with whom Cowie corresponded comprise a significantly larger universe of Canadian print culture in the process of expanding, stimulated by a grow-ing reading public, modernizing media, and emerging middlebrow tastes.

Many of these writers shaped the terrain of writing in Canada before the canon, and more than a few published whole series of books that now

Dear Miss Cowie: The Construction of Canadian Authorship, 1920s and1930s

Victoria KuttainenJames Cook University

146 | Kuttainen

languish in obscurity despite achieving varying levels of national literary celebrity and prestige in their time. Their correspondence and careers offer refreshing insights into the literary history of Canada during this period and connect Canadian cultural activity to a broader cultural history of the interwar period. Scholars of modernity have characterized the period between the wars as an epoch of major cultural transition. Ben Singer, for instance, considers it a “striking explosion” of industrialization, urbaniza-tion, transportation, migration, mass communication, amusement, and consumerism (19). Yet literary histories have characterized the 1920s and 1930s in Canada as barren, insular, and lacking in literary talent. The few works that have secured a place in the canon reveal the way retrospectives of the period overemphasize the impact of literary modernism, national-ism, or politicized narratives of the Depression at the expense of other kinds of texts and authors widely read in their own time.

Cowie’s expansive cast of literary correspondents worked actively throughout the Depression and contributed a wide variety of literature. They funded their writing careers in Canada or the U.S. as journalists, academics, publicists, magazine writers, textbook authors, radio broad-casters, screenwriters, or civil servants. They were folklorists, nature poets, animal fabulists, travel and adventure writers, and authors of masculine historical and industrial romances or feminine coming-of-age novels and sentimental verse. Their work was certainly variable in quality, but taken as a whole it nonetheless indicates a much richer range of writing and cultural complexity than literary histories of Canada have generally acknowledged. Margaret Cowie’s library of Canadian literature therefore suggests an urgent need to critically modify our understanding of literary culture of the interwar period in Canada. As Pierre Bourdieu explains in Distinction, literary work plays an instrumental role in, and is also affected by, the larger social process of the assignment and contestation of cultural worth; Cowie’s library and correspondence afford some insight into the processes of contestation and exclusion in Canada. In considering the wide range of Canadian writing included in Cowie’s library, and in placing the work of this dynamic cultural period between the wars back into the context of its time, we can grasp a broader understanding not only of the circulation and reception of literary work in its own era but also of the historical construction of literary value.

Fewer than a dozen of the eighty-three authors in Cowie’s correspon-dence have been featured in William H. New’s seminal History of Cana-dian Literature. More than that number are featured in Anne Innis Daag’s The Feminine Gaze: A Canadian Compendium of Non-Fiction Women

Victoria Kuttainen received her ba Honours

and ma in English from ubc before moving to

Australia to study with the postcolonial research

group at the University of Queensland. Her

doctorate, which looked at Canadian, Australian,

and American short fiction in a comparative

framework was published as Unsettling

Stories by Cambridge Scholars Press in 2010. She is Senior Lecturer

and Margaret and Colin Roderick Fellow of

Comparative Literature at James Cook University

in tropical Queensland. Her research in progress focuses on the interwar

period, magazines, travel across the Pacific,

and late colonial modernity. Images can

be viewed at www.transportedimagination.

com.

Dear Miss Cowie | 147

Authors and Their Books, suggesting that the longstanding scholarly bias in favour of fiction in literary studies is one reason why a large sample of work in Cowie’s collection has been overlooked. Although the critical dismissal of non-fiction has been corrected in the recent past with the turn to life writing and autobiography studies, historical non-fiction remains under-studied despite its prominence on publisher’s lists in its time. But even more extensive revisions of Canadian literary history suggest additional reasons why these authors are in some cases now completely unknown. Scholars of Canadian literature such as Heather Murray, Carole Gerson, and Maria Tippett have undertaken extensive histories that have enlarged our understanding of print culture and publishing history in Canada. Nick Mount has examined the nationalist bias of Canadian literary criticism, which has overlooked work set outside Canada due to an assumed “topo-centric axiom” that has guided canon formation. He has further shown that commitment to this axiom has repressed in our cultural memory the historical circumstances that impelled many Canadian writers to relocate to the more lucrative and robust American print market. Lorraine York and Faye Hammill have separately appraised the relation between liter-ary repute and the market and have demonstrated a complex relationship in which literary success is often gauged by literary critics as inversely proportionate to market success. Further, Faye Hammill, Michelle Smith, and Candida Rifkind have offered recuperative understandings of mid-range and middlebrow material that was widely read in its own time yet dismissed until now as unworthy of scholarly attention due to an aca-demic bias in favour of non-sentimental, highbrow, and non-commercial prose. These studies have prompted reconsiderations of the processes of canon-making throughout the twentieth century that define the field today. My discussion of the Margaret Cowie Fonds will draw from this important body of revisionist literary scholarship to consider how many of these now obscure writers provide valuable insights into Canadian authorship and reading tastes as they were conceived in their own time, in the era immediately preceding Massey. I argue that Cowie’s collection is particularly valuable as a record of Western Canadian reading tastes and writing cultures when emerging literary associations in central Canada were beginning to shape public awareness of Canadian literature. Further, I show that the letters in Cowie’s correspondence offer rare glimpses into the way these authors operated as working writers and constructed their identities in complex ways in relation to the nation, celebrity, the market, and the literary field before the rise of CanLit as a sanctified and institu-tionalized literary category.

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As Nick Mount has observed in his study of the diverse output and careers of another group of largely forgotten Canadian writers, the orderly proces-sion implied by chronological lists of representative greats in an anthology or university reading list hardly represents the disorder of literary produc-tion in its day. This disorder is succinctly captured in Cowie’s library, as her collected letters bear witness to a busily emerging literary culture that was, a decade after the turn-of-the-century expatriate exodus documented in Mount’s study, increasingly becoming organized and professionalized in Canada. Even still, Cowie’s correspondence reveals that CanLit was yet an uneven enterprise drawing from a variety of professional and amateur writers, not all of whom aimed to capture an elite literary readership and many of whom could not afford to do so. This was an era before protec-tionist measures were introduced in Canadian publishing, during the rise of Hollywood and mass communication, when the market was flooded by American books and magazines with which Canadian writers needed to compete. The introduction of compulsory schooling was only a genera-tion old, and the level of education had been raised to the mandatory age of fifteen only by 1912, university education was still for the elite, and the broadest market of Canadian readers was emerging from the expanding middle class. And while more of the interwar writers in Cowie’s collection were based in Canada than in Mount’s study of an earlier period when a career as a writer in Canada was even less viable, many continued to reside across the border or overseas, and literary traffic remained diffuse. Just as many letters from Canadian authors were penned from the Canadian cities of Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, or Toronto as from regional areas such as the Maritimes, the Yukon, or the Kootenays. Still, many letters

Florence Nightingale School where Cowie taught in 1930s Vancouver.


arrived stamped from California, London, or New York, and some came from farther afield from places such as China or France. Canadian writers in this interwar period were peripatetic, not only because they needed to be but often because they wanted to be.

W. H. New observes of this period well after the Empress liners of the Canadian-Pacific Steamship company had established routes to carry mail, cargo, and workers between England, Halifax, Vancouver, and Hong Kong (A History 88) that even the once-remote Vancouver and Victoria were established as substantial seaports by this time. Yet New’s own literary history of Canada includes almost no travel writing from this time. In stark contrast, Paul Fussell has convincingly demonstrated that in the decade after the Great War, the golden age of massified leisure travel inspired widespread mobility that deeply inflected British literature. Remarkably, the record of interwar travel is almost absent in the history of Canadian literature and is only now being corrected by the work of Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith (in press) and in the field of history by Cecilia Morgan’s A Happy Holiday. Just as Nick Mount hypothesizes that Canadian canon-makers intent on connecting literature to the project of nation narration actively suppressed content that had been set or written across the border before a viable market for paid writing existed in Canada, travel writing from the interwar period of massified travel appears to have been similarly excluded from Canadian literary canons.

These texts provide a rich, transnational record of Canadian writing and interests during this period, and this record is therefore historically valuable as it expands our critical understanding of the Canadian inter-war experience. Certainly these texts cannot be understood or rendered valuable in Leavisite terms that privileged densely symbolic highbrow literature or in the nationalist terms that would later dominate univer-sity literature courses in Canada. But their popularity highlights forms of writing that were actively consumed by the reading public and that were therefore influential in their own time. Perhaps the best-known Canadian traveler in his day, Gordon Sinclair was a major celebrity in Cowie’s library. Between the wars, Sinclair’s magic lantern lectures and travelogues packed out Toronto’s Massey Hall, and by the time of Cowie’s correspondence with him he had published two best sellers, Footloose in India (1933) and Cannibal Quest (1935). Footloose in India anticipates the gonzo journal-ism of literary journalists like Hunter S. Thomson. Its creative subtitle is uncannily Hunter-esque, Adventures of a News Chaser from Khyber’s Grim Gash of Death to the Tiger Jungles of Bengal and the Burmese Battleground of the Black Cobra. Yet despite the book’s populist appeal, it was pub-

150 | Kuttainen

lished by a prestigious press, and when Oxford University Press released it the book became an overnight bestseller in Canada. As a persona and writer, Sinclair modulates the registers of elite and popular tastes. He was an inveterate traveler with a wide appeal—so widely popular, in fact, that the Toronto Star, who retained him as one of their most spectacu-larly successful correspondents, bankrolled his travel. He boasted in his letters to Cowie that his travels had “carried him 300,000 miles into 86 countries” (14 November 1934), and the three-page self-penned biogra-phy he included in his correspondence with Cowie clearly conveyed his understanding that his own celebrity functioned as a kind of currency redeemable across the nation.

While Sinclair was a star travel-writer whose celebrity was known throughout Canada, he was at home in Toronto. But other travel writers widely known across Canada during this period were locals to British Columbia, and Cowie’s library included many of them. One of these was James Livingstone Stewart, who penned his correspondence to Cowie from West China University in 1927. Livingstone Stewart, a contemporary of Pearl S. Buck, was, like Buck, an avid Pacific traveler who wrote tales of the so-called Orient. Almost unknown in the U.S. where Buck had achieved critical success, Livingstone Stewart was well known in Canada. Another Western Canadian traveler in the Cowie library was Francis Dickie, who had been the Vancouver Daily Province correspondent from Paris between 1925 and 1932. As well as penning newspaper and magazine articles from Europe, Dickie wrote the Western Canadian regional travel narrative Strange Souls’ Journeying: A Romance of the Canadian Rockies. In a 1922 article in Popular Mechanics Dickie introduced to the world another Vancouver-based writer, his friend Frank Burnett, also a habitual traveler. Frank Burnett was a Vancouver celebrity and self-made real estate magnate who amassed a fortune in salmon canning. His sea travels between British Columbia, Canada, and Queensland, Australia, were shaped into several books that were popular enough to be reissued throughout the interwar period: Through Tropic Seas (1910), Through Polynesia and Papua (1911), Summer Isles of Eden (1923), and Wreck of the Tropic Bird and Other Stories (1926). Like Gordon Sinclair, Frank Burnett gave magic-lantern travelogue lectures of his travels, and his books were replete with photographs that gave Canadians visual as well as narrative access to other worlds. Likewise, Burnett was able to access different sectors of Canadian society. In 1927, the University of British Columbia awarded Frank Burnett an honorary doctorate. He was also made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His career and repute ranged from highly respectable to widely popular.


The ease with which Burnett moved between academic and main-stream circles may provide a key to understanding both the popularity of his writing in its day and its later dismissal. Burnett’s mobility, in social terms as well as geographic ones, attracted a rapidly massifying middle-class readership that still looked to academia as a standard-bearer of values. The magazine in which Dickie introduced Burnett to the world, Popular Mechanics, suggests a broad appeal to an emerging middle class of mostly high school- and college-aged male readers who held practical science in high regard and saw education as their ticket to a better future. But as academia professionalized, the mainstream appeal of these writers may have counted against them. Their travel narratives were ill suited to the project of nation-narration Mount describes as closely linked to the professionalization of CanLit, and their straightforward, unadorned prose was unsuited to Leavisite values as they later emerged in the discipline of English and Canadian literatures. Ironically, while Burnett’s donation to the University of British Columbia, which Dickie described as “the Largest Collection of South Seas Curios” in the world (“Mysterious” 834), formed the very nucleus of the Museum of Anthropology there, the discipline of anthropology rebuffed him, too. As Patricia Mayers explains, as the disci-pline of anthropology professionalized, self-styled salvage-ethnographers such as Burnett were spurned as an unfashionable embarrassment (221), and Burnett’s artifact collection and writing were both literally banished to dark drawers and the locked basement of the university library. Despite and perhaps because of their broad appeal in their day, these writers could not be accommodated within academic or publishing paradigms that later took hold.

Yet these and other writers in Cowie’s correspondence show that West-ern Canada boasted many local writers by this time, even if they were later dismissed and even as they continued to publish in London, the U.S., or Toronto. Miss Cowie herself was born in Ontario, relocating to Vancouver at the age of twenty-eight to take up a post at Aberdeen Public School where she worked for twenty years before completing ten more years of service teaching grades five and six at Nightingale School. Before her relocation to the West Coast, Cowie had made connections with the Canadian Authors Association, which had formed in 1921. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the association maintained its strongest presence in Central Canada and lent by this simple fact of geography—like the other cultural institutions Maria Tippet documents in her important survey of the literary and cultural landscape in Canada before the Massey Commis-sion—more visibility and support to authors from central Canada. But,

But as academia

professionalized,

the mainstream

appeal of these

writers may

have counted

against them.

152 | Kuttainen

uniquely, while Cowie’s project was national in scope it was also local in particular. Cowie often invited writers to visit the school, including Bliss Carman, Isabel Eccelstone MacKay, Frank Burnett, Douglas Durkin, and Emily Murphy, and her preference for engaging writers who were likely to inspire her students with their local histories and life stories could explain why more than a few of the writers Cowie engaged in correspondence were native to British Columbia. Along with Frank Burnett and Francis Dickie, local writers in her library included Evah McKowan, Hubert Evans, George Griffin, B. A. McKelvie, Tom McInnes, Irene Moody, Margaret Pike, A. M. Stephen, and Alice (Ann) Winlow. Prominent residents of the Prairie provinces also took up correspondence with her and were featured in the library: W. T. Allison, Nellie McClung, Emily Murphy, and Douglas Durkin. In general, the rarity of these Western writers in a Canadian lit-erary archive from this period suggests that the process of canonization has remained as centrally focused as those early institutions. Even so, in the emerging national market that followed the years of the great literary exodus Mount surveys, few Canadian writers—no matter where they were based—could rest secure on their reputation.

Cowie’s practice of writing to Canadian authors and soliciting their biography as well as their photograph gleaned a significant response from Canadian writers in the twenties and thirties, revealing that many of them were still touched by the novelty of recognition. Many sent her inscribed copies of their books, and by 1924 the Vancouver schoolteacher had amassed a still expanding library of 180 Canadian titles, most of which appealed to both an adult and a youth readership.1 Cowie’s correspon-dence with these writers reveals their personal responses to and views of emerging cultural forces. Moreover, their letters expose candid insights of self-revelation, varied attempts at self-styling, and more than a few cases of long correspondence that developed into lasting relationships. Almost all her correspondents were regulars on her extensive Christmas card list, and many responded with warm, personal notes.2 The personal nature of the correspondence reveals the way that these writers conceived of their

1 A complete inventory of the authors whose correspondence is included in the Margaret Cowie Fonds can be located in a pdf catalogue compiled by George Brandak, attached to the catalogue listing at ubc’s Rare Books and Special Col-lections: http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=3157046.

2 For instance, Bliss Carman’s Christmas greeting from 22 December 1928 readsMerry Christmas Happy New Year, Bliss Carman To all in Division IV of the Aberdeen School, Vancouver, I send my most grateful thanks for your very kind remembrance. Please accept also my best wishes and happiest memories.


authorship and writing projects in varying terms that were not always predominantly concerned with nation narration.

Perhaps most revealingly, few of the authors conceived of themselves as builders of Canadian literature first and foremost, even as almost all of the correspondents offered glowing praise for the library. Francis Dickie’s is perhaps the most effusive. “Though words are my mode of living, I find it a most difficult task indeed to adequately reply,” he writes breathlessly in 1923, “to your letter telling me of your interest in Canadian writers.” Only a handful wrote to congratulate Cowie on the Canadian literary nature of her project. Among these was Mabel Burkholder, who by the date of this correspondence in 1924 had published The Course of Impatience Carn-ingham (1911) and Before the White Man Came (1923):

We talk a good deal about creating a love for Canadian litera-ture, but it rests very largely with you teachers to interest the coming generation while they are still young and capable of being moulded. I think you have done a wonderful work in securing a hundred and eighty Canadian books, and in creat-ing a love for them by finding out about the authors and col-lecting their pictures. (1 April 1924)

While Burkholder emphasizes the adjective “Canadian,” her appreciation rests equally on the broader literary character of the project, to which she imputes an Arnoldian sense of literature’s power to preserve “the best that has been thought and said,” as well as literature’s intrinsic ability to shape character. Character formation was regarded as a central func-tion of primary and secondary school education, and literature had a prominent place in shaping citizens. Thus, it is unsurprising that school libraries registered a concern for developing a national curriculum well before university classrooms did, as Lucie Robert, Christyl Verdygn, and Janet B. Frisney have shown (57). But this disjunction between school and university curricula has implications for the attribution of cultural value. As Heather Murray has demonstrated, Canadian university English programs were still for the most part immersed in the teaching of philol-ogy in the 1920s (“Adjusting”). Further, Murray’s work on the Toronto

“women’s academy of literature” (Working 47) suggests that this Canadian school curriculum—and accordingly its place on the lower rungs of cul-tural capital if not popular esteem—was gendered. Murray’s observation of the gender disparity between female schoolteachers and the male chairs of English who were only just being appointed at Canadian universities (Working 2–45) indicates that Canadian literature as an institution was

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first curated by women educationalists who embodied the goals of public edification and who were charged with the task of imbuing character in the next generation.

The role of female schoolteachers as curators of Canadian texts for their pupils may explain the preponderance of sentimental poets in Cowie’s col-lection, including Jean Blewett, Isabel Eccelstone MacKay, Frances Beatrice Taylor, and Annie Pike. It also explains the weight accorded to the writers Katherine Hale (Mrs John Garvin), Mazo de la Roche, Marian Keith, and Agnes Laut, who held prominent positions in the collection as well as in the hearts and minds of the Canadian public at the time. These writers’ popularity, as Faye Hammill suggests in her 2007 study of celebrity and literary repute in Canada, was later regarded as inversely proportionate to their literary reputation as assessed by the mostly male literati who came to dominate the profession of literature in the universities. These writers’ reputations teetered between the perils of popular appeal and the promises of market success in a nascent national literary market. All of these writers, as well as the feminine project of national character forma-tion, can be tentatively associated with the middlebrow, which offers not only a paradigm for reading these texts but also an explanation for their attractiveness to this female school teacher and their subsequent disap-pearance from literary history.

While it was once a term of derision, literary historians have recently reclaimed the middlebrow as a rich site of cultural analysis and as an explanatory mode of understanding how and why many texts and writers unaligned with high modernism or social realism have been dismissed by literary scholars or assumed too facile for analysis. The term remains difficult to define; as a literary field, it has been variously theorized as a category of texts, a set of cultural institutions, a group of readers, or a way of reading. The field of the middlebrow has exploded as a topic of study in the last decade in the U.S. and Britain, but scholars of Canadian literature, with the exception of Faye Hammill, Michelle Smith, and Candida Rifkind, have been less active in taking up the sets of questions it raises about the formation of taste and readerships and the circulation of literary value. Nonetheless, scholars of the middlebrow do broadly agree that the its texts and reading preferences are associated with feminine writers and readerships, and they identify a body of texts and writers who share many characteristics with those in Cowie’s correspondence. As Erica Brown and Mary Grover explain, the “middlebrow” was at first used in the 1920s to dismiss a whole range of texts perceived as feminine, middle class, aspira-tional, domestic, or drawing from outdated literary modes. Yet, these deri-


sions were themselves, as Brown and Grover see it, “a product of powerful anxieties about cultural authority and processes of cultural transmission” (1). In the U.S., as Janice Radway has convincingly shown, a growing seg-ment of newly white-collar urban professionals and middle-class readers laid claim to high culture through purchasing its accoutrements such as the texts recommended by the Book-of-the-Month Club. And as Shelley Rubin has demonstrated, the genteel tastes associated with an emerging class of public intellectuals associated with Ivy League universities also set standards of “good reading” and middlebrow literary taste that was firmly aspirational during this period. While some of these factors were present in Canadian culture in some form, none of these forces was felt quite so intensely in Canada in the 1920s as they were across the border or overseas.

Yet Cowie’s project as a female schoolteacher intent on shaping her young charges through acquaintance with literary markers of instruc-tion, delight, and inspiration is replete with middlebrow sensibilities and aspirations, and the authors she approached appeared to her as middle-brow figures: standard-bearers of value who were nonetheless accessible to and loved by the public. Michelle Smith proposes that middlebrow values took shape in Canada around these precise values of middle-class aspiration and virtuous nationalism, which generated “a whole body of fiction that aimed to provide instruction, entertainment, and inspiration” (27). Another factor that seems to have shaped the middlebrow in Canada, as Candida Rifkind observes (“Too Close”), is anti-modernism and its association with female sentiment. Sentimental women poets also take a prominent place in the Cowie collection. In her work on the enormously popular but critically dismissed poet Edna Jacques, Rifkind draws on Lynda Jessup’s discussion of anti-modernist sensibility as an ambivalent reaction to modernity: “a pervasive sense of loss that often coexisted in the decades around the turn of the century along with an enthusiasm for modernization and material progress” (Jessup 4 quoted in Rifkind 111, n3). Rifkind theorizes that sentimental verse expressed a reaction against modernity at the same time as it provided a tonic that eased the onward march of modern consumer culture. Neither of these aspects of its appeal, Rifkind goes on to state, squared with the values that later shaped the Canadian canon: the formally complex aspects of high modernism or the politics of the Left (“The Returning”).

Following Nicola Humble’s equation of the middlebrow with feminine literature, Rifkind has powerfully suggested that the popularity of female middlebrow writing in Canada in the interwar period has subsequently been overlooked by typically male literary critics who perceived such writ-

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ing as insular, parochial, domestic, feminine, and distastefully unselfcon-scious and fixed in its middle-class orientation. Literary authority figures in Cowie’s own time seemed to react to her project in similar terms. Even as Cowie’s library began to attract popular notice across Canada, George Locke, chief librarian of the Toronto Public Library, dismissed it for these reasons. With faint praise he cheered Miss Cowie on for doing a “splen-did work” before cursorily passing over her letter to Miss Lillian Smith,

“the Head of the Children’s Department, as she will be interested in what you have to say” (3 May 1921). The dominance of female coming-of-age books in Cowie’s collection may suggest then that this sort of writing may have appealed to the school teacher not only because of the middle-school context of the library’s readership but also for the way it offered, as Humble suggests of the British middlebrow, ways for young women to negotiate new class and gender identities in a period of volatile change for women and the middle classes. Both tasks of writing-the-region and negotiating social and cultural change for young women can be observed in many of the books in Cowie’s collection: Muriel Denison’s Susannah series (Susannah of the Mounties, Susannah of the Yukon, Susannah at Boarding School, and Susannah Rides Again), L. Maud Montgomery’s Anne series, Evah McKowan’s Janet of Kootenay and Graydon of Win-demere, and Irene Moody’s Delphine of the ’Eighties. But just as Cowie’s letter was passed over by Canada’s chief librarian to his female assistant, these books and their authors were also likely later dismissed for not only their feminine and middle-class associations but also for their voluminous nature. As Rifkind explains in “The Returning Reader: The Serial Novels of Mazo de la Roche,” the sheer popularity and serial nature of de la Roche’s publications linked her commercial success to mass production and led to a lowering of her literary esteem.

Yet, although teachers, readers, and writers of middlebrow novels and sentimental verse were female, male authors profited from the school market for Canadian writing, often securing lucrative textbook contracts. Several of Cowie’s male correspondents note that they have secured such deals. A. M. Stephen, writing from West Vancouver in 1926, remarks that he had secured a contract with J. M. Dent and Sons to publish his New Anthology of Canadian Literature for Schools, which had been put on the school curriculum. This gave Stephen the publishing and distribution net-work he needed to secure publication of his novel of the British Columbia coast, which was brought out the next year by the same firm of publishers. Whilst many authors were still sending their work to New York or London for publishing, Canadian texts were clearly money-makers in the school


market and ways for authors to establish a relationship with local pub-lishers. Writers such as Stephen, who generally wrote, as he explained to Cowie, “narrative poems descriptive of various phases of the early pioneer life of British Columbia” (15 January 1923) appeared to fund less lucrative careers in poetry by profiting from what Garth Lambert has observed as the growing educational trend in the first two decades of the twentieth cen-tury of locating Canadian texts for the school curriculum. This emphasis on the role of Canadian books in schools served the twin agendas of the

“promotion of identity, unity, and sovereignty” as well as “the designation of self-knowledge” (Robert, Verdygn, and Frisney 57) even as Canadian literary nationalism was still in its formative stages.

Understandably, then, while some correspondents praised the project of character formation, other writers completely overlooked the literary aspects of Cowie’s enterprise to emphasize solely its nationalistic benefits, disconnected from the literary project. Often those writers who praised Cowie’s library in nationalist terms were historians or anthropologists rather than literary figures. “Dear Miss Cowie,” writes the Canadian histo-rian and anthropologist Paul A. W. Wallace in the 1920s, “It is always nice to find people who are teaching their children to love and respect their own country.” Continuing in a detached, scientific tone, Wallace praises Cowie’s efforts as “an interesting experiment” and encourages her students to form an appreciation of the beauty of their region. Wallace’s anthropological vocation shines a light on the large number of Cowie’s correspondents engaged in some form of indigenous ethnography or folklore. In the years before anthropology coalesced as a discipline of experts, many of these Canadian writers—including Burkholder but also Charles Marius Barbeau, Charles Clay, A. L. Fraser, and Agnes Laut—blurred the lines between ethnographic and literary pursuits; most of these wrote regional local colour mixed with an intense interest in indigenous life. Many of Cowie’s correspondents emphasized the development of regional writing as equally important to the national dimension of Cowie’s collection.

Writing from his home in Nova Scotia, Archibald MacMechan had by the time of his correspondence with Cowie written Halifax in Books (1906) and The Headwaters of Canadian Literature (1924). These demonstrated his twin preoccupations in developing regional and national letters, pre-occupations that, as Nick Mount explains in When Canadian Literature Moved to New York, were seen at this time not as oppositional activities but as mutually constitutive. Rather than praising “Canadianness” or “literari-ness,” MacMechan, Professor of English at Dalhousie University, rather surprisingly values most the “inspiring and local examples of heroism and

Often those

writers who

praised

Cowie’s library

in

nationalist

terms were

historians or

anthropologists

rather than

literary figures.

158 | Kuttainen

adventure” Cowie’s library provides to young people. He writes, “I think you are doing a very important work. Young people are apt to look to the ends of the earth for heroic adventure and inspiring example. If you can show them these things growing at their own doors, they will be more inclined to value their own land and their own people” (7 April 1925).

MacMechan emerges here as a distinctly different figure from the sort of literary professoriate Queenie Leavis endorses in Fiction and the Reading Public, in which she conceives of a vanguard of highly intellectual university elites poised to fight a war against mass culture. The values Professor MacMechan endorses—romance and heroism—are precisely the ones Leavis associates with the crassness of the middlebrow. Leavis conceives as the middlebrow as a widespread, middle-class capitulation to the incursions of commercial sensationalism, marketing, and mass production. In her 1932 tract, Leavis calls the professoriate to arms against it: “If there is to be any hope, it must lie in conscious and directed effort of resistance by an armed and conscious minority” (270) engaged in “edu-cational work in schools and universities … and the teaching of English in particular … fired with a missionary spirit … as an essential part of the training of taste” (271). As a figure associated with the Canadian university, MacMechan did not share this evangelizing project.

MacMechan’s values appear to be more closely aligned with “the new romantics” identified by Nick Mount as part of the Canadian expatri-ate group of writers who adopted American modes of anti-modernism. Instead of female sentiment, these writers predated the middlebrow but shared some of its features. Instead of avoiding modernism, which had not taken form yet, they eschewed, according to Mount, “analysis” (98). In place of “careful study,” they preferred “thrilling incident” (Mount 98), but they learned to avoid “palpable falsity and childish exaggeration”(98). Like Edna Jacques’s poetry, this writing was expressly commercial. It would find expression in new magazines like Field and Stream, Mount argues, and dominated booksellers’ lists. And like Jacques’s writing, this genre was deeply invested with anti-modernist sensibility. But unlike Jacques’s writing, except for sharing a highly gendered dimension and appeal, the new romance would be a virile, masculine genre, Nick Mount explains. These dynamics might account not only for MacMechan’s high valuation of “heroism and adventure” but also more broadly for the number of writers and titles in Cowie’s library deeply connected to these masculine values. Cowie’s library contains plenty of female writers in the Edna Jacques cat-egory who share her ambiguous cultural status, contemporary popularity, and subsequent obscurity. Jean Blewett and Isabel MacKay are but two. But


the library is equally replete with these male writers of adventure stories. George Griffin’s work fits this category. After growing up in Alberta, Grif-fin had contributed stories to Canadian and American magazines and went on to publish such novels as At the Court of King Neptune: A Romance of Canada’s Fisheries (J. M. Dent and Sons, Toronto, 1932) and Legends of the Evergreen Coast (Clarke and Stuart, Vancouver, 1934). Charles Clay’s work was also of this kind and shared the broad appeal to a boyish readership. Author of Swampy Cree Legends (1938), Clay went on to become Secretary of the Canadian Authors Association and later editor of Canadian Author (1942 to 1946) as well as to produce Teen-age Book Parade, a middlebrow radio show that offered aspirational instruction to the young adult market. Arthur Hunt Chute is another who takes up a middlebrow position, in life as well as fiction, laying claim to the cultural capital attached to higher education while simultaneously disclaiming it in favour of more earthy and manly qualifications. “I have two university degrees,” he writes in 1927,

“but I am most proud of my discharge as A. B. [Able Seaman].” Author of Far Gold, a story of open sealing on the Atlantic and a search for treasure that takes the reader from Nova Scotia to the romance of the South Seas, Hunt Chute also claims a cosmopolitan, name-dropping cachet when he writes that it was “in Mexico, in 1914 that Jack London encouraged me to try the story of Nova Scotia on the sea” (30 June 1927).

Writing from New York City, Arthur Hunt Chute is not the only corre-spondent who advises Miss Cowie to look up his profile in “The American Who’s Who” (June 1927). While Q. D. Leavis strongly associates resistance to mass culture with “deliberately setting out to resist American influence” (272), most of the writers in the Cowie collection participate in the “con-tinental tradition” of North American writing that Nick Mount describes, in which Canadian expatriate writers saw their expatriatrism not as selling out but, rather, as going to market and contributing sometimes-Canadian stories of literary regionalism and local colour to a broader North Ameri-can tradition. Often these writers simply document the facts of writing life for Canadian writers in the interwar years, since the market was still more robust and remunerative south of the border. Constance Skinner, one of Cowie’s correspondents who lived in New York, demonstrates this North American sensibility, of necessity genuflecting to the more established culture of letters in the U.S., as well as demonstrating a quiet pride in her Canadian heritage:

Today’s NY Tribune reviews the last 10 vols of the “Chronicles of America” and calls this series “the noblest American work

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since the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the framing of the Constitution.”

The managing director of that branch of the Yale Univer-sity Press which publishes the Chronicles is a Canadian and it was chiefly in his brain that the great scheme of this series of American history was born. We don’t “holler” much, we Canucks, but we saw a pile of wood!! (2 December 1921)

Similarly, William Alexander Fraser was published prolifically in New York. Although most of his more than fourteen books were set in Canada, Canadian literature has not remembered his name nor does it seem that the Canadian literary establishment was kind to Fraser in his day. Like Cowie’s other correspondents Seton and Roberts, Fraser wrote a number of popular animal stories and also touched on the popular genres of Native tales and frontier adventure. As he found readerships through the seem-ingly borderless traffic of magazine publishing and reprinting, he notes that in his day he enjoyed a broad readership and, indeed, a fan following from all around the world, even as he was often spurned in his native Canada:

I have had a great many letters from all over America, even from Paris, France, one about that very simple series of animal stories that was in the Saturday Evening Post; but the highest tribute was the one from New York asking for the privilege of printing a good slice in the new New York reader. It certainly is a tribute to Canada, for they have thousands of US writers, and in New York a US writer is a huge cheese—don’t blame them: I only wish that Canada had the same spirit. When I write a book absolutely the only bad review I get is a Canadian one. If you catch a prophet on your lawn kick him into the street—that is, if he’s a neighbour.

Even as Rifkind and Mount separately observe that many of the expatriate writers appear to have been shed from the canon because they left Canada or wrote on topics perceived to be un-Canadian, many write about their success in the broader North American market as a point of pride. John Newton McIlwraith notes that his name can be found “in an edition of either the English or the American Who’s Who” and points out that he made his living for fourteen years as a manuscript reader for Doubleday Page, New York. He adds

I think the Canadian public owe you a great deal for what you are doing toward making Canadian works properly known in Canada. At the same time I think there is a little silver lining


with the cloud of general neglect—a linking that few stop to consider. It is a really great advantage to Canadian authors that they are forced to fight for their lives in free and open competition with the outside world in the highest and Ameri-can markets, where they are judged solely on their merits as authors. (5 April 1925)

For the Canadian writers in the Cowie collection, periodicals were both instrumental in promoting literature and sources of regular work. Most writers in Cowie’s collection were on payrolls of magazines as journalists, and many regularly comment that their stories and articles appeared in Canadian and American magazines. Their association with the periodical market validates Michelle Smith’s observations of the interconnections between interwar periodical writing, Canadian middlebrow authorship, and Bourdieu’s theories of the inverse relationship between commercial success and cultural distinction. Yet this was the field of interwar Cana-dian print production. May Wilson, for example, writes to Miss Cowie on the glorious letterhead for the Farmer’s Advocate and Home Magazine which promoted itself as “The Best Advertising Medium in Canada.” She admits that out of financial necessity she has long since given up her ambi-tion of writing in verse, “knowing prose to be my medium,” and indicates that editing the magazine is her bread and butter: “I have not yet given up editorial work, but may do so some day.” As the scales of value went, writers may have preferred poetry over prose, but they found that news-paper work was most remunerative and that readers preferred magazine fiction over poems. The dependence of Canadian writing on magazines and newspapers at this time is also symptomatic of the way in which interwar Canadian letters were embedded in a commercial nexus. From the 1950s on, the professoriate trained in New Critical approaches would expect literary writing to be distinguished from mainstream commercial writing, to exist as somehow set apart from the contaminating taint of the commercial press and the crude exigencies of market forces. Contrary to this later impulse, the interwar Canadian writers included in Cowie’s library seemed to embrace an ethos of commercial success as a measure of personal success.

In this sense, Canadian literature as it circulated in the interwar period was seen not only as a form of nation-making and self-improvement but also of self-making, gauged in both literary and commercial terms. Arthur Hunt Chute writes of this success in his letter to Cowie in the 1920s, “My summer home is in Nova Scotia, winter home in Bermuda.” He acknowledges to Cowie that his “ambition is [to write] a series of historical

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romances of Canada,” based on the commercial development of Canada’s fur trade, “hbc versus Nor Westers.” In other words, Hunt Chute aspired to be a successful writer of commercial fiction that paid. Closely related was the ethos of unabashed self-promotion that emerges in the Cowie cor-respondence. Writing from his letterhead marked “The Author’s Club, 40 West Seventy-Sixth Street, New York City,” Hunt also notes his appearance in the American Who’s Who to which he directs Miss Cowie for further biographical data pertaining to his career. Being saleable and having sold stories in print was clearly a measure of success in this emerging com-mercial and literary nexus between the wars.

This impulse toward self-promotion and saleability bears witness to the emerging promotional nexus of agents and publicity of the 1920s and 1930s detailed in Richard Ohmann’s Selling Culture. Ohmann’s study of Munsey’s magazine is a case study of this phenomenon as it reached an apogee in the 1920s’ U.S. Throughout the Cowie letters it is possible to observe a delayed although quickly accelerating version of similar factors in interwar Canada. At work on his seventh novel Grain (1926), Robert Stead’s letterhead lists him as Director of Publicity, Department of Immigration and Coloniza-tion, and he puts his public relations skills to work in promoting national literature and his own association with an eminent publisher:

Dear Miss Cowie

I am greatly pleased to have your letter … which was forwarded to me here by the Musson Book Company of Toronto and to know the active steps you are taking to build an interest in Canadian literature … I am sure that the results of this work on your part will be very far reaching; in fact, if Canadian teachers generally would do as you are doing I would almost say the results would be immeasurable. (17 January 1922)

The measure of these results, in Stead’s terms, seems to be both commer-cial and patriotic. Through his long continuing correspondence, Stead praises these nation-building aspects of her collection, not only in terms of what these books might do for patriotism but what reading and buying them might “be done for Canada” to stimulate Canada’s economy and its writers’ fame. The effects of the expanding public relations industry can be seen in several letters in the Cowie correspondence. It was not unusual during this time for authors like Mabel Burkholder (most well-known at this time for her adaptations of the Native legends of Pauline Johnston) to promote themselves on their letterhead. Burkholder’s letterhead (from 1924) notes that she is a “Journalist and Play-writer” and offers “short story


writing taught by mail. Literary work criticised and revised. Terms reason-able.” Frederick William Wallace was another writer whose letterhead was elaborately self-promotional, celebrating him as author of Blue Water, The Shack Locker, and The Viking Blood. Similarly, Katherine Hale (the nom de plume for Amelia W. Garvin) promoted herself on her letterhead as

“Author of Canadian Cities of Romance, Legends of St Lawrence, and Morn-ing in the West.” She even included on her letterhead a New York Times endorsement: “One of Canada’s most distinguished authors, and an artist of rare personal charms.” Hale’s letterhead is elaborately self-promotional, including in its text two even longer reviews. As literary critic for the Mail and Empire of Toronto, located in the kind of middlebrow position of jour-nalistic literary advocacy described by Rubin and Radway, Garvin/Hale enjoyed some prominence within this emerging commercial literary nexus. Like many writers of her time she also developed recital and lecture work that served as another means to bring her writing to an aspirational class of the reading public. The reviewing circuit in Canadian newspapers was developing by this time as a means of spreading Canadian literary fame. Other writers would include in their letters to Cowie cuttings of newspaper reviews. The reviews of Hale’s husband, John Garvin, are referred to by several of Cowie’s writers as endorsements of their work. Irene Moody, who by this time had written three successful books, sends the following letter from her home in Vancouver:

Dear Miss Cowie:

Preliminaries …

I am sending under separate cover a copy of Delphine of the ’Eighties (John Garvin reviews it as “the most important novel of its kind that has appeared in our literature since the publica-tion in 1908 of Anne of Green Gables”—review photographed, and enclosed) … Enclosed you will find a printed slip with some data about myself in the review by John W Garvin of Toronto. (15 November 1934)

In the review from the October issue of the Canadian Bookman, John Garvin is himself promoted as “Noted Canadian man of letters, Toronto.” Writers with whom Cowie corresponded also saw that her school library was worthy itself of promotion. Robert Stead writes in 1922, “I am taking the liberty of supplying a portion of your letter to one or two of my liter-ary friends connected with the Press as I think the idea you have cannot be given too wide publicity.” Frederick B. Watt writes in 1931, “your class

The reviewing

circuit in

Canadian news-

papers was

developing

by this time

as a means of

spreading

Canadian

literary fame.

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library interests me greatly … Has it ever found its way into an article for a Canadian magazine? If it hasn’t it should.” And even where the emerg-ing university literati were already consecrating some authors such as the well-known poet Charles G. D. Roberts (MacMechan 120), these writers were not set apart from the circuits of promotion. In 1928, Roberts explains to Cowie that he is “just back from giving some recitals in Seattle” and commends the promotional work of Cowie’s library: “I have heard a lot about the great work you are doing for Canadian literature.”

Besides the work of character formation that characterized Cowie’s library in terms of nineteenth-century Arnoldian values, then, a more modern spirit of self-making inspired Cowie’s collection and suffused her correspondence. Cowie’s practice of eliciting authors’ biographies, autographs, and photographs clearly participates in the emerging interwar discourse of celebrity. As Faye Hammill explains in Women, Celebrity, and Literature Culture Between the Wars (17), new currents of image-based fame and publicity, closely associated with the rise of cinema, came to shape literary repute at this time. Further, newspaper and magazine pub-lishing led to a relationship with the public that was far more intimate, ephemeral, and mundane than book publishing, and Cowie’s access to these writers suggests their willingness to be personally approached and to share personal material. As a response to the reconfiguration of public and private space that was going on at this time alongside the rise of celebrity in film and radio, the public personae these writers convey through their letters are often meticulously crafted. Although a famous Canadian figure and an almost constant contributor to Maclean’s and Chatelaine, Nellie McClung displays herself as a public figure accessible on a personal level. Writing on letterhead from the Legislative Assembly of Canada, her tone is perhaps the most convivial of any of the writers in Cowie’s collection:

My dear Miss Cowie:

I am delighted to send my picture, and have a new one too, which will go forward in a day or so. I am going to send

“Painted Fires” too, just to show you the true school ma’am of me. I think you are a darling and every writer in Canada owes you something. If I come to Vancouver any time will you ask me to address your club? I’ll pretty nearly do it anyway! … I have written another article for Maclean’s on “Age.” I hope you will like it too. So glad you liked my article on Mother’s Day. All this guff about “No-matter-how-old-she-is-remember-she’s-your-mother” makes me tired.


With sincere appreciation, Ever Yours, Nellie L. McClung (7 November 1925)

Others styled themselves as jocular, approachable moderns brimming with ease and informality. A letter, for instance, in 1938 by Charles Clay, Literary Editor of the Winnipeg Free Press conveys all the play and casual-ness of a present-day Facebook message, but is also sure to note his status as “literary editor”:

Dear Miss Cowie

Under separate cover I have sent you some copies of some of my scribbles ... Here is a slightly larger pic of myself, grin-ning a bit fatuously—but grinning. It is so hard to grin, these days, for most of us. Of course, the publication of swampy cree legends (Macmillan) and young voyageur (Oxford) helps to keep a grin on my mug. The answers to the big four questions follow:

Born in Winnipeg

Began to be an author because the lady who taught an Indian school the year before me had written an article about the Indians and got it published—and of course I couldn’t let a mere lady outdo me!!

Hurry up and buy a copy of short stories Dec.25 issue (a “pulp” magazine) and you’ll see an adventure article by me & about me. Price 25 cents!

and assure your charges that as I write this (at 4.30am) that I am very much alive, but dog-tired; so I am going to bed!

Sincerely

Charles ClayLiterary Editor (16 December 1928)

Emily Murphy scrolls in deliciously capricious, bubbly, and large hand-writing signifying a larger-than-life Canadian personality who by now has become a household name. She is both a famous writer and one with whom most Canadians imagined an intimate acquaintance. Murphy pur-posely cultivates this sense of relatedness and personal acquaintance:

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Feb 7, 1923

My dear Miss Cowie:

Sure, and I’m proud as proud to send my picture to the young ones. Fancy anyone wanting it!

I can see that your class is a unique one, well, because they have a unique teacher.

I am going to tell some of our Edmonton teachers about your class and see if they cannot follow in your lead. I hope that you have become an Associate Member of the Vancouver Authors’ Association. You should be. Maybe, I will meet you when I go to Vancouver this summer …

With best regards

Always sincerely yours

Emily Murphy, (“Janey Canuck”)

p.s. Tell the kiddies that if I were Queen of Canada they should have several holidays immediately.

The deliberate use of sentimentality is another form of self-styling in the Cowie letters. Winnipeg-born and Toronto-educated Muriel Denison wrote using the pen name Frances Newton for many articles in This Week, Reader’s Digest, McCall’s and other magazines; she had worked deliber-ately and hard to break into writing, but her biography as she pens it for Cowie is the sentimental Hollywood tale of discovery. Best known as the author of the Susannah of the Mounties series, Denison tells her story as one of Hollywood star discovery. Her Susannah of the Mounties was the inspiration for the Shirley Temple movie of the same name. Cannily aware of a visual culture emerging out of popular tastes for melodrama and sentimentality, Denison writes firstly of her heart, secondly of her appearance, and thirdly of her personal success story.

Dec 12, 1937

Dear Miss Cowie

What a delightful letter for an author to receive. I can’t think of a more delightful form of praise than to have my book Susan-nah, a Little Girl With the Mounties, the cause of heart burn-ings!


I am enclosing a brief biography of myself and a photograph. My hair is red, my eyes blue, and I am fairly tall …

Her letter goes on to brag of her work’s praise from as highly respectable and traditional quarters as the Queen of England and as widely commer-cial and modern quarters as Hollywood (12 December 1937).

Denison is one of several writers in Cowie’s correspondence who seems to understand the value of courting celebrity for publicity. The formula of her Susannah of … series suggests that her books were pur-posely branded generic products that mimicked the successful Anne of Green Gables formula. Lucy Maude Montgomery was one of Cowie’s most famous correspondents and Canada’s most spectacular Canadian success story, but at the time of her correspondence in 1922, when she sends an autographed copy of Rilla of Ingleside (1922), Montgomery has already reached the age of forty-eight. Even relatively unknown B. C. author Evah McKowan, another of Cowie’s correspondents, would mimic this formula with her publication (in 1919) of Janet of Kootenay and the later companion text for boys, Graydon of the Windermere (1920), both of which were also included in the Cowie library. Indeed, a connection with celebrity appears to hold enough power during this period that some writers grasp for the status of celebrity by association. One such, Gordon Hill Grahame, notes his famous ancestry immediately in his correspondence: “My great-uncle, Gordon Hill Grahame, was a novelist (his first novel, The Bond Trium-phant, won Hodder and Stoughton’s Canadian Prize Novel Contest in 1922). My great-great-great (etc.) uncle was Kenneth Grahame, author of the children’s classic The Wind in the Willows (remember Toad of Toad Hall?)” (26 May 1926).

In a similar vein, the writer Norah Holland notes that she is “the cousin of Y. B. Yeats” (17 January 1922). While these writers seek the cachet of status derived from the association with a lineage of established writers, others clearly felt validated by the new currency of fame deriving from emerging starlet culture in Hollywood. While later the Hollywood studio system would come to associate film with formulaic plots and American factory-style production, at this point the Canadian writers with film con-nections are proud of these. Canadian author and British politician Gilbert Parker writes in 1921 on the letterhead of Famous Players-Lasky Corpo-ration Paramount Pictures Lasky Studio, proudly referring to his work Wild Youth, which had been adapted for film in 1918. Mazo de la Roche also writes with notable pride of her association with film, noting the wild success of the film adaptation of her novel Jalna. As the brow wars played out against a background of the expanding commercialism of film, all of

As the brow

wars played out

against a

background of

the expanding

commercial-

ism of film, all

of this would

change.

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this would change. Nonetheless, the Cowie Fonds exist as snapshots of a fascinating time when many of these values—the literary, the commercial, the private and the public, entertainment and edification—were still very much in flux between the two world wars.

Middlebrow writers, whose work appealed to a broad class of well-educated, aspirational readers, likely suffered from an intensification of critical obscurity because of the commercial success they received in their day. Such factors mean that this kind of record of interwar Canadian writ-ers is rare, and as archivist Amy Tector points out, “enormously powerful” not the least because such records, which are “almost accidental acquisi-tions” (104), “preserve writers and stories that might otherwise be lost” (106). The point here then is not merely that the Cowie Fonds unearth a few lost Canadian texts but, more importantly, that longstanding nation-based frameworks of understanding literature written in Canada or by Canadians do not give us ways to recognize them. Within the progressivist sentimental nexus elaborated by Jaime Harker in America the Middlebrow or Candida Rifkind in her work on Edna Jacques and Mazo de la Roche, a broader middlebrow context provides ways to understand the character-forming project of the Bildungsroman collected by Cowie for her pupils, copycats of Anne of Green Gables (1908): Evah McKown’s Janet of Kootenay (1919), Ethel Hume Bennett’s Judy of York Hill (1922), Irene Moody’s Del-phine of the ’Eighties (1931), and Muriel Denison’s Susannah of the Mount-ies (1936) and Susannah of the Yukon (1937). Faye Hammill’s work on the formation of celebrity in middlebrow terrains gives us ways to understand the courtship of publicity and commercial success many of these writ-ers display, another factor that may have subsequently prevented critics from taking their work seriously. Richard Ohmann’s work on the rise of commercial mass culture in the magazines of the 1920s gives us another way to understand the journalistic turn of much of this writing, and the journalist travel writer Gordon Sinclair’s spectacular celebrity in particular. Hammill and Smith’s work on interwar travel and magazine writing sug-gests paradigms to recuperate a lost record of Canadians abroad during this period. Further, the terrain of magazine publishing, in conjunction with the middlebrow novels and poems of sentiment, may account for the strongly gendered nature of much of this work. Boys’ adventure fic-tion and girls’ Bildungsroman novels would have found different outlets in the emerging field of new women’s magazines like Chatelaine, men’s magazines like Esquire, boys’ magazines such as Popular Mechanics, and amidst the welter of other magazines of their day.


In addition to the commercial demands and constraints on these authors in their time, the uncertain outcome of the brow wars that were at their most intense during the period between the two world wars may also account for the mixed outputs of many of these writers: serious or genteel poetry was often published by the same writers who put out sea tales, adventure stories, sentimental women’s fiction, or folklore. Similarly, the Cowie Fonds show us a mixed terrain of national publishing, in which many writers published or worked in the United States or London and drew on a cosmopolitan culture in which Canada was placed for the first time in a network of massified travel. At the same time, it is possible to see in these letters a deliberate attempt to write in a colloquial register, whether to convey an authentic, approachable voice, or for other reasons. Distinctively, as Canadian writing was coming of age against this middle-brow context, some of the writers in this archive praised or undertook an explicit project to inculcate patriotism in their Canadian readers. Notably, this project of patriotism was most closely tied to pedagogic aims or to non-fiction writers rather than writers with literary ambitions.

The writers who conceived of themselves and Cowie’s project primarily or solely in terms of Canadian literature were far fewer than the writers who conceived of themselves in these broader terms: as regionalists, travel-ers, journalists, commercial successes, as poets or nature-writers, as col-lectors of folklore, or as writers of girls’ coming-of-age tales. While Cowie might have seen her work as building up a national literature, ironically it may go a small way toward helping dislodge and reconfigure the national literary history of this period. In this case, Margaret Cowie’s library and letters open a small schoolhouse window by providing fresh new perspec-tives on writing as it occurred in Canada before it got branded as CanLit.

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Dear Miss Cowie: The Construction of Canadian Authorship 1920s-30s

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