Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) is widely known as the heroine of the Crimean War and the founder of the modern profession of nursing. She was also a scholar and political activist who wrote and worked ...

Why does it seem as if everyone is writing memoirs, and particularly women?
The current popularity of memoir verifies the common belief that we each have a story to tell. And we do...especially women. ...

A transcription of Lucy Peel’s wonderfully readable journal was recently discovered in her descendent’s house in Norwich, England. Sent in regular installments to her transatlantic relatives, the journal pre ...

What comes to mind when we hear that a friend or colleague is studying unpublished documents in a celebrated author’s archive? We might assume that they are reading factual documents or, at the very least, s ...

January 21, 1995: Dorothy Joudrie is arrested for attempting to murder her estranged husband. Soon after, Audrey Andrews begins to write her book. Audrey and Dorothy had known each other as children, ...

Marian Engel emerged as a writer during that period in Canada when nationalism increased and “new feminism” dawned. Although she is recognized as a distinguished woman of letters, she has not been widely stu ...

How does the imagination entwine the shreds of memory of family, place and culture to root a self in the fluid experience of the present?
Daughter, wife, mother, teacher, writer and feminist academic, ...

Annie Leake Tuttle was born in Nova Scotia in 1839 and died there in 1934, yet her search for education and self-support took her far afield. During her life she filled important positions from Newfoundland ...

“It’s an autobiography! If I tell you what’s in it you won’t read the book.” — Claire Drainie Taylor
Or would you? Maybe you’d be intrigued by the progression of a life begun as an unexceptional little g ...

How did women in the early twentieth century, newly arrived in North-West Canada, cope with their strange new lives — so very different from the lives they used to lead? How did they see themselves and t ...