A Passionate Pen: The Life and Times of Faith Fenton

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

A Passionate Pen is “the story of a woman who has all but completely
disappeared from the history of her country.” For 19 years, in a time
before intrusive cameras made commonly known the physical appearance of
even minor celebrities, Alice Freeman led a double life, teaching school
in Toronto as Miss Freeman and writing a newspaper column under the
pseudonym “Faith Fenton.” Fenton, who “predated all other women
columnists,” wrote about, interviewed, and corresponded with the
famous and the ordinary, from John A. Macdonald to lonely lighthouse
keepers. She visited and wrote exposés of lunatic asylums and prisons,
clinics and women’s shelters. “One of the prime propagandists” for
the new National Council of Women of Canada, she “exposed herself as a
feminist before the word was invented.” At 40, no longer teaching and
out of a regular writing job, she joined the gold rush in the Yukon and
wrote remarkable reports on her journey for The Globe. In Dawson she met
and married a doctor who later held important offices in Toronto. With
him she traveled widely, wrote less, and faded into obscurity. She left
a number of letters and photographs to relatives, and a mass of writing
to the archives of several newspapers and magazines.

Jill Downie, author of six internationally translated historical
novels, brings her storyteller’s craft to this biography, along with
an evident enthusiasm for archival research. There are 20 pages of
annotations, an impressive bibliography, and a thorough index, but few
source notes. Her “Life and Times” devotes almost as much space to
the latter as to the former, for “most of the evidence [about Fenton]
is indirect” and much must therefore be inferred from her columns.
“Faith’s story is an adventure, a romance and a mystery,” writes
the author of this highly readable and valuable addition to our
historiography.