Isolation and Commitment: Frederick Philip Grove's Settlers of the Marsh

Paul Hjartarson teaches English at the University of Alberta.

This is the 16th volume in ECW Press’s Canadian Fiction Studies
series. Other volumes include studies of Margaret Laurence’s The Stone
Angel, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, Timothy Findley’s The
Wars, and Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business. Dahlie’s study ranks
among the best.

Like all volumes in the series, it includes a chronology of the
author’s life, an assessment of the work’s importance, an overview
of its critical reception, a detailed reading of the text, and a
bibliography. Dahlie’s careful scholarship is evident throughout. In
the opening pages, he includes “Notes on Editions and References” in
which he explains why he uses the most recent NCL edition of Settlers of
the Marsh in his study, and lists the “serious misprints” contained
in that edition. In the closing pages, he not only provides a list of
works cited, but annotates each entry. There is, however, at least one
surprising omission from that list: E.D. Blodgett’s perceptive essay
“Alias Grove: Variations in Disguise,” which appears in his 1982
study, Configuration: Essays in the Canadian Literatures.

The strength of Isolation and Commitment lies in its reading of
Grove’s novel. Dahlie’s interpretation is both detailed and
insightful. Observing the importance both of women and storytelling in
Settlers of the Marsh, he argues that “[by] telling the stories of
their mothers, Niels and Ellen take the obligatory step of ridding
themselves of one restricting force, but by doing so they thrust
themselves into a precarious isolation, which Niels at any rate cannot
handle.” Although Isolation and Commitment is intended as an
introduction to Settlers of the Marsh, readers already familiar with
Grove’s writing can learn much from Dahlie’s study.