Constance Lindsay Skinner: Writing on the Frontier

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Constance Lindsay Skinner was born in British Columbia in 1877. Her
father was a fur trader, her mother a one-time teacher, and her best
teenage friend of mixed-race descent. Constance began to write when she
was seven and published in her teens. Her stories were rejected in
Ontario for their “lack of morals.” She moved to California for her
health and never returned to Canada. Her love of the frontier and her
involvement with the Aboriginal people informed everything she wrote.

She worked as a journalist and drama critic in Los Angeles and Chicago,
then moved on to New York, where she wrote plays, prize-winning poetry,
fiction, and history, and also became a highly regarded editor. She
gained great popularity with her juvenile novels and great respect for
the historical series Rivers of America, which she created and edited
with a determination to make them “literary not historical.” She
died in 1939 before the series was finished, but many of the volumes are
still in print today.

Jean Barman has given us a detailed history of a Canadian author
unknown in her own land who never gave up the struggle to support
herself as a writer, to be taken seriously though a woman, and to be
accepted as a historian though not a professional. Accompanying the text
are photographs, a chronology, an index, an extensive bibliography, and
notes.

The reader might wish for fewer plot synopses of the early fiction
where women are sexual beings who frequently want independence yet also
want to succumb to men; but this was the temper of the time, and the
stories are boldly sensual. As for her private life, we learn only that
Skinner never married and that she lived alone but had many friends,
including the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, for whom she had an
undying love that was never returned. Her career was the driving force
of her life.