Doors Held Ajar

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views
of Canada, 1880–1914.

These fictional and autobiographical stories are by three Newfoundland
women writers not well known, but well worth knowing.

Isobel Brown, a Scottish war-bride, who has an amazing memory for
seemingly trivial encounters, perceptively transforms them into
meaningful coincidences for her readers. Brown’s descriptions of her
trip across the Atlantic to St. John’s (a new bride with a baby), and
of her first sight of St. John’s, are poignant.

In her five short stories, Peggy Smith Krachun takes us into St.
John’s bars, into the homes of wealthy St. John’s families (who
preferred “outport girls” as their domestics), and generally into
the lives of ordinary people, exposing their weaknesses but celebrating
their individual strengths. Her story “Outport Girl Preferred” is
superb.

Nellie P. Strowbridge, the finest and most poetic writer of the three,
explores, in a subtly ironic way, the kind of mental bondage imposed by
a “Holy Roller” experience (the term was an early epithet for
members of the Pentecostal Church). In “The Feather,” “The Last of
the Holy Rollers,” and “The Wings of Azrael” Strowbridge
brilliantly vivifies the waning (but never wholly relinquished) power of
narrow religion on the human psyche. Her stories are funny, stirring,
and truthful.

Doors Held Ajar contains enough humor, pathos, and surprise to satisfy
the casual reader; enough artistry to please the more critical; and
enough Newfoundland flavor to entice those many Canadians who now want
to know more about that wonderful place.