Lords of the North
Introduction by Dr. Valerie Legge
Dr.
Valerie Legge of the department of English wants to expand our knowledge
of Canada’s past through revealing the part of the rich legacy
of the country’s female writers.
Dr. Legge has written the introduction for the reissue of A.C. Laut’s
classic Lords of the North. “This is the first time it
has been reissued since the early 1900s,” she said. The book
is historical fiction set in Canada’s north.
“When I was a student and did my first Canadian literature course
at the PhD level, I realized that there were very few women taught
in the course, so I went looking for some,” Dr. Legge indicated
as the origins of her interest in Laut’s work. After finding
Laut’s writings, she asked “how come we had never heard
of her? I was just fascinated by her: she was an ordinary young woman
... (from) working class people in a frontier kind of place and she
decided to become a writer.”
In her time, the author was a well-known writer. “This was her
first novel and it was published in 1900,” Dr. Legge said. “She
went on to publish another four or five novels, half a dozen histories,
hundreds of articles in American and Canadian magazines. She made
a lot of money and was very well off. Three or four months of every
year she was able to go out and hike in the wilderness and come back
and write about where she had been and what she did.”
Dr.
Jessie Legge
Dr. Legge hopes that the publication of
this book will draw attention to the many Canadian women writers working
at the beginning of the twentieth century. “It’s the fact
that women were very active in the publishing industry — she
was just one of many. She wasn’t an anomaly. There was a community
of women doing similar things, which is important so that we don’t
read that historical period from such a restricted point of view,
so that we have other writers like her there that we can have a look
at.”
Lords of the North is available at the University Bookstore.
Lords of the North
Introduction by Dr. Valerie Legge
Dr.
Valerie Legge of the department of English wants to expand our knowledge
of Canada’s past through revealing the part of the rich legacy
of the country’s female writers.
Dr. Legge has written the introduction for the reissue of A.C. Laut’s
classic Lords of the North. “This is the first time it
has been reissued since the early 1900s,” she said. The book
is historical fiction set in Canada’s north.
“When I was a student and did my first Canadian literature course
at the PhD level, I realized that there were very few women taught
in the course, so I went looking for some,” Dr. Legge indicated
as the origins of her interest in Laut’s work. After finding
Laut’s writings, she asked “how come we had never heard
of her? I was just fascinated by her: she was an ordinary young woman
... (from) working class people in a frontier kind of place and she
decided to become a writer.”
In her time, the author was a well-known writer. “This was her
first novel and it was published in 1900,” Dr. Legge said. “She
went on to publish another four or five novels, half a dozen histories,
hundreds of articles in American and Canadian magazines. She made
a lot of money and was very well off. Three or four months of every
year she was able to go out and hike in the wilderness and come back
and write about where she had been and what she did.”
Dr.
Jessie Legge
Dr. Legge hopes that the publication of
this book will draw attention to the many Canadian women writers working
at the beginning of the twentieth century. “It’s the fact
that women were very active in the publishing industry — she
was just one of many. She wasn’t an anomaly. There was a community
of women doing similar things, which is important so that we don’t
read that historical period from such a restricted point of view,
so that we have other writers like her there that we can have a look
at.”
Lords of the North is available at the University Bookstore.
