Tapestry of War: A Private View of Canadians in the Great War

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Like Barbara Tuchman, Sandra Gwyn has used individual characters as
“prisms” of history. In her tapestry of social history, the lives of
such men and women as Brooke Claxton, Mike Pearson, Max Aitken, Harold
Innis, Talbot Papineau, and Grace MacPherson encapsulate and reflect the
larger story.

Gwyn is an award-winning writer and private researcher best known for
her first book, The Private Capital, a portrait of Ottawa in the late
19th century. Tapestry of War picks up where that book leaves off. World
War I, Gwyn argues, transformed Canada from colony to nation. This
thesis is, of course, not new. The intriguing claim is that the
experiences that Canadians underwent in that war shaped the remainder of
their lives: their hopes, their goals, their careers. Method reflects
thesis. Gwyn writes: “This is a book about people. It recounts the
Great War experiences of ten Canadians, three of them women, who left
behind them in diaries and letters and personal memoirs an intimate and
unguarded record of what they were doing and of what they were thinking
and feeling at the time. These private chronicles have been amplified by
other contemporary materials—newspapers, magazines, and so on.”

Grace MacPherson, the subject of one chapter, served as an ambulance
driver in France. The war provided an opportunity to many women to move
out of familiar environments into strange and intimidating workplaces.
Among the many illustrations are paintings of women making shells and
doing acetylene welding.

Gwyn provides a fresh look at a critical period of our history and the
half-century that followed. Her lively and intimate style makes for good
reading.