The Yellow Briar
A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside
- Publisher
- Dundurn Press
- Initial publish date
- Jul 2009
- Category
- Classics, General, General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781550028485
- Publish Date
- Jul 2009
- List Price
- $18.99
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781770705999
- Publish Date
- Jul 2009
- List Price
- $9.99
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Description
Folktale, memoir, fiction, literary hoax, The Yellow Briar is all of these. Ostensibly the charming remembrance of an Irish orphan who escapes the Great Famine of 1840s Ireland and comes to the New World to seek a fresh start on the streets of Toronto and in the pioneer hinterland of Canada West (Ontario), the book was actually a fictional humbug perpetrated by John Mitchell, a Toronto lawyer, who first published the tale in 1933.
Patrick Slater, the protagonist of the "memoir," is said to have died in 1924 but not before setting his saga down on paper. And what an account it is! The Globe and Mail felt that the book "gives a picture of Ontario to be found in no other work of fiction we know and has won for itself a permanent place in Canadian literature." If nothing else, Slater/Mitchell captures perfectly the lilt of the Irish and the wry wisdom of an old soul to paint an affecting portrait of trials and tribulations in a long-ago time.
About the authors
Patrick Slater was the pseudonym of John Mitchell (1880-1951), a Toronto lawyer.
Michael Gnarowski co-edited The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, compiled The Concise Bibliography of E nglish Canadian Literature, and edited the Critical Views on Canadian Writers Series for McGraw-Hill Ryerson. He has written for Encyclopedia Americana, The Canadian Encyclopedia, The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography, and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Gnarowski is professor emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Other titles by
Other titles by
The Deserter
Flying a Red Kite
The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada
Essential Commentary on Poetry in English, Third edition
Making of Modern Poetry in Canada
Essential Commentary on Poetry in English, Third edition
God's Sparrows
Ringing the Changes
An Autobiography
In Flanders Fields and Other Poems
The Voyageur Classic Canadian Fiction 7-Book Bundle
All Else Is Folly / Pauline Johnson / The Town Below / Self Condemned / Storm Below / The Yellow Briar / Maria Chapdelaine
The Voyageur Canadian Biographies 5-Book Bundle
The Firebrand / Mrs. Simcoe's Diary / The Scalpel, the Sword / The Men of the Last Frontier / Pilgrims of the Wild
The Voyageur Canadian Essays & Criticism 2-Book Bundle
Selected Writings, A.J.M. Smith / The Kindred of the Wild