Literary Images of Ontario

Alan Thomas is an associate professor of English at the University of
Toronto.

This delightful book comes out of the Ontario Historical Studies Series
but is not in the plain mode of an official history. Keith uses the
writing of the past 200 years to create a historical picture of Ontario
packed with variety and color.

It is not, of course, an entirely positive picture: a matter-of-fact
description of winter-starved Chippewa Indians by Anna Jameson balances
against attempts by other romantic European travelers to project a
wholly sublime face onto the wilderness. The isolation of farm families
in the era before radio is expressed by such diverse writers as Stephen
Leacock and Raymond Knister, along with the compensating enthusiasm for
recreation that led Susanna Moodie in the pioneer days to list,
surprisingly, “music and dancing” as the chief accomplishment of
Canadian women.

Fiction writers provide much of the social detail and tone. Alice Munro
is especially useful in depicting small-town life; Robertson Davies
gives us the “small city”; and the big city itself, Toronto, is
presented through the decades by a virtual procession of novelists. The
little-known Robert Barr provides lively scenes of winter sports on the
harbor ice in the 1870s; the chilling psychological temperature of
Anglo-Protestant Toronto in this century comes through in the pages of
Morley Callaghan, Hugh Hood, and Margaret Atwood, writers who also
indicate the changing face of Toronto under multi-ethnic invasion. In
the closing chapters, Mary di Michele’s poetry depicts the clash of
culture as new generations grow in the mixed soil of Europe and Ontario.
Keith, himself an immigrant, joins the cavalcade and records his own
impressions of Ontario, as seen in the small city park before his house.

A biographical index provides useful information on the authors.