Literary Criticism Women Authors
Constance Lindsay Skinner
Writing on the Frontier
- Publisher
- University of Toronto Press
- Initial publish date
- Dec 2002
- Category
- Women Authors, General, Women
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780802036780
- Publish Date
- Dec 2002
- List Price
- $84.00
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781442673274
- Publish Date
- Nov 2002
- List Price
- $84.00
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Description
Constance Lindsay Skinner made a living as a writer at a time when few men, and fewer women, managed the feat. Born in 1877 on the British Columbia frontier, she worked as a journalist in Vancouver, Los Angeles, and Chicago, before moving to New York City in 1912, where she supported herself by her pen until her death in 1939. Despite a prolific output - poetry, plays, short stories, histories, reviews, adult and children's novels - and in contrast to her reputation in the United States, she remains virtually unknown in the country of her birth.
Reconstructing Constance Lindsay Skinner's writing life from her papers in the New York Public Library and from her publications, Jean Barman argues for three bases to her success. As well as a capacity to respond to market forces by moving between genres, she possessed an aura of authenticity by virtue of her Canadian frontier heritage. As a literary device, the frontier gave a freedom to tackle contentious issues of Aboriginal and hybrid identities, gender and sexuality, that might otherwise have been far more difficult to get into print. Third, and very important, was her willingness to subordinate a private self to the life of the imagination.
Barman ponders Constance Lindsay Skinner's absence from the Canadian literary canon. She mixed with such twentieth-century personalities as Jack London, Harriet Monroe, Frederick Jackson Turner, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Cornelia Meigs, Long Lance, and Margaret Mitchell, yet was unrecognized in her own country. Her sex mattered, just as it did for fellow Canadian women writers. So did her facility at multiple genres, a talent that, even as it made possible a writing life, prevented her from achieving a major breakthrough in any one of them. Perhaps most responsible was her identification with the frontier of a nation whose centre long shaped literary matters in its own image. Constance Lindsay Skinner makes a significant contribution to Canadian and American history and to literary and gender studies.
About the author
Jean Barman, professor emeritus, has published more than twenty books, including On the Cusp of Contact: Gender, Space and Race in the Colonization of British Columbia (Harbour Publishing, 2020) and the winner of the 2006 City of Vancouver Book Award, Stanley Park’s Secret (Harbour Publishing, 2005). Her lifelong pursuit to enrich the history of BC has earned her such honours as a Governor General’s Award, a George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award, a Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing and a position as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She lives in Vancouver, BC.
Other titles by
Raincoast Chronicles Fifth Five
Fifth Five
British Columbia in the Balance
1846–1871
On the Cusp of Contact
Gender, Space and Race in the Colonization of British Columbia
Invisible Generations
Living between Indigenous and White in the Fraser Valley
Maria Mahoi of the Islands
The Literary Storefront: The Glory Years
Vancouver's Literary Centre 1978-1985
French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest
Good Intentions Gone Awry
Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast
Indian Education in Canada, Volume 1
The Legacy
First Nations Education in Canada
The Circle Unfolds