The Embroidered Tent: Five Gentlewomen in Early Canada; Elizabeth Simcoe, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Anna Jameson, Lady Dufferin

Ann Tudor was the former Managing Editor of Canadian Book Review Annual and had her own Toronto-based crafts company, Honest Threads.

Not the least appealing aspect of this collection of critical biographies is its title: “The Embroidered Tent” beautifully conveys the cultural conflicts experienced by the five women whose writings are investigated — a culture shock to which each of the women reacted in her own way.

In her Introduction, Marian Fowler describes the “courtesy books” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, books that shaped the conduct of women, “focusing on their place in society and moral welfare, with scant attention to small, specific points of etiquette” (p. 8). Women were “physically delicate, retiring, submissive, sentimental, passive, intuitive. They opted for lyricism: they day-dreamed, deferred to others, sat quietly at home embroidering, were always refined and tender” (p. 9). Imagine, then, these women as they were transported from a circumscribed life in a “genteel pocket-handkerchief of a country” to the enormities of Canada, with “giant lakes and forests flung from horizon to horizon like great bolts of cloth.” The Embroidered Tent reveals, through the diaries, letters, and published articles of five nineteenth century women, the changes that their Canadian existence wrought.

The gentlewomen under observation are Elizabeth Simcoe, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Anna Jameson, and Lady Dufferin, each of whom is treated in a separate chapter (though numerous references and comparisons are made from one chapter to another). Included are photographs of the women and of their husbands, and drawings and paintings of the period, some of which were done by the women themselves.

Ms. Fowler’s careful and sensitive readings of the thoughts of these women provide great insight into their lives, Canadian life, and the nineteenth century in general. Anyone interested in the history of women in nineteenth century Canadian social history should read this book.