St Ursula's Convent or The Nun of Canada

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.

This, the seventh such produced by the Centre for Editing Early Canadian
Texts, is a critical edition—in this case of the first novel written
by a Canadian (Julia Beckwith Hart) and published in Canada (Kingston,
Upper Canada, 1824). The novel itself, hardly worthy of literary
distinction, is a melodramatic tale of lost lovers found and stolen
children returned to rightful parents so that brothers and sisters are
united, all in time to prevent unnatural marriages and accommodate the
wished-for ones. It may, as Lochhead insists, be an “important
cultural artifact,” though scarcely as significant as he suggests, for
it does not reveal much about “early Canadian manners, morals and
myths.” It is perhaps safer to say that it is merely a “literary
curiosity”—one that few people, other than students of Canadian
literature, will want to read.

For those students, however, this edition is an ideal text. It is, as
most of the Centre’s texts are, accurate, authoritative, and
beautifully printed (the typeface in this one having a period
resemblance to the original). The text is followed by a set of necessary
but judicious explanatory notes, a quasi-facsimile title page for the
1824 copy-text, and a list of emendations to that text. Lochhead’s
introduction, though primarily textual, offers a concise description of
the novel’s milieu, reception, and transmission. And though his
attempt to justify the novel’s modern importance—“a significant
early attempt by a Canadian of French and English heritage to articulate
a vision of Canada that united the best of England and France”—seems
overstated, it does force us to acknowledge that literature can be read
for other than “literary” reasons.