Working in Women's Archives: Researching Women's Private Literature and Archival Documents

Margaret Conrad is Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at
the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Atlantic Canada: A
Region in the Making, and coauthor of Intimate Relations: Family and
Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1

These essays show convincingly that archival sleuthing can add greatly
to our understanding of women’s contribution to literary history, but
the task is not an easy one. Not only are archival sources on women
relatively thin, but they are also difficult to find—often buried, for
example, in collections featuring male writers and compiled by male
editors. Moreover, interpreting women whose experiences differed greatly
from ours and whose documents may have been meant only for private
consumption raises unsettling ethical and interpretive questions.
Finally, the continuing difficulty of convincing the literary
establishment that the private documents of literary women are worthy of
study testifies to the value still placed on a male-dominated canon.

The essays are arranged to allow readers to enter gently into the
complex questions being addressed. To focus the topic, Carole Gerson
offers a survey of archival holdings of works by Canadian female
literary figures and provides some valuable tips on how to proceed in
this age of increasingly Internet-based research. In her elegant
description of a decade-long effort to piece together the life of
18th-century writer Deborah How Cottnam, Gwen Davies shows just how
rewarding such hard work can be. Helen Buss’s examination of multiple
interpretations of a narrative by Marie Rose Smith, a Métis woman sold
into marriage for $50, alerts readers to some sticky ethical and
scholarly issues involved in analyzing sources once they are found. Mary
Rubio provides a shocking reminder of how recently it is that even the
splendid diaries of L.M. Montgomery were discounted by the gatekeepers
of SSHRC grants and publishing contracts. Three essays—Rosalind
Kerr’s on her grandmother’s letters, Christl Verdun’s on the
Marian Engel Archive, and Marlene Kadar’s on what Frida Kahlo’s
letters to Ella Wolfe reveal about the larger constellation of
anti-Stalinist intellectuals in the 1930s—draw, as do other essays in
this volume, on literary theory to tease meaning from their elusive
sources.

Rich and provocative, this sample of some of the best scholarship being
done in Canada on women’s life writing will be welcomed by specialists
in the field and by others interested in the difficult task of
reclaiming and reinterpreting women’s lives.