Hobnobbing with a Countess and Other Okanagan Adventures: The Diaries of Alice Barrett Parke, 1891-1900

Margaret Kechnie is head of the Women’s Studies Program at Laurentian
University and the coeditor of Changing Lives: Women in Northern
Ontario.

In the late 19th century, 29-year-old Alice Barrett traveled from Port
Dover, Ontario, to the Okanagan region of British Columbia to act as
housekeeper for her younger brother, Harry. As a means of communicating
with her family in Ontario, Alice kept a diary in which she carefully
recorded the daily happenings of work on the ranch and her life with her
husband, Harold Parke. She also had much to say about feminism, racism,
travel, and the politics of the country and of her community. The
book’s main title emerges from Alice’s friendship with the countess
of Aberdeen, wife of Canada’s governor general, who, while living at
the Coldstream ranch near Vernon in 1895, invited Alice into her circle
of friends. Alice admired the countess but rejected her feminist
convictions, although, at the same time, she agreed to become the first
secretary of the Vernon Chapter of the National Council of Women.

Alice writes with the confidence that comes from being a well-educated
and opinionated woman. Her diaries provide invaluable insights into life
in pioneer British Columbia and into the social happenings of a
community that was home to a diverse population of Aboriginals, Asians,
and Europeans. Anyone wanting to know more about the lives of Canadian
women during a pioneering period will gain much from reading Hobnobbing
with a Countess.