Union of Opposites: Letters from Rit Svane Wengel

Patricia Myers is a historian with the Historic Sites and Archives
Service, Alberta Community Development, and the author of Sky Riders: An
Illustrated History of Aviation in Alberta, 1906–1945.

She had not seen Paul Wengel since he had left Denmark to farm on the
Canadian prairie 14 years earlier. This collection of letters to a good
friend of Rit’s documents the Wengels’ 35-year marriage.

Wengel’s letters are both well written and revealing. We learn about
farming trials, baking that doesn’t rise, new neighbors and fellow
immigrants, and politics and social customs in Saskatchewan, Denmark,
and British Columbia. Although Wengel and her husband reconciled in
later years, their marriage up to that point was largely an unhappy one,
as evidenced by the book’s title and, of course, by the letters
themselves. The editors are to be congratulated for not following the
lead of many collections of settlement letters by expurgating the darker
material.

Included in this sensibly and sensitively edited volume are an
excellent introduction and a list of further reading.