Away from Home

Pauline Carey is the author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Any lover of Elizabeth Brewster’s poetry will know what to expect—a
simple account of real life with a twist of poignancy in the telling.
This short memoir fills in a gap noted in her earlier The Invention of
Truth by covering the years in the late 1940s when she first left home.

Home was New Brunswick, but she roamed abroad to study at Radcliffe
(Harvard), Indiana University, and Kings College in London, and began
her teaching career at a girls’ school in Ontario. Along the way, she
wrote three drafts of a novel (which was eventually lost) and was
disappointed in the publication of her first chapbook of poems, even
though Northrop Frye himself praised the poetry.

The memoir moves along quietly, put together with memories, poems,
diary entries, letters, and short fiction that draws heavily on
Brewster’s own experiences. The shock awaiting us at the end of the
book is, in hindsight, a logical outcome of what we have read.
Brewster’s narrative of her days at Radcliffe is tinged with
loneliness and feelings of insignificance. In England, she finds
friends, but a boyfriend in Canada marries someone else, a fleeting male
friendship is discontinued, a job in distant India is nervously turned
down. The pain of youth lurks gently behind the careful daily struggle
of the student.

As the memoir concludes, Elizabeth Brewster is once more away from
home, facing the possibility of snow in Victoria. She has bought red
tulips for the table, and a comforting pile of books awaits to keep her
occupied should she be snowed in the next day.