by Beth Powning
The Commodore (the name is my invention) is based on an eccentric bachelor of the period, Dr. Goodfellow, a dentist who wore a paisley shawl around his shoulders when he went for walks “with the ends drooping to the ground,” as described by Grace Aiton in The Story of Sussex and Vicinity.
Sussex had its first telephone exchange and operator in 1891. I took the liberty of changing the date to a few years earlier.
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TRUE THINGS:
1889: The last pauper auction was held in Sussex, New Brunswick. The Kings County Almshouse and Poor Farm was established in the Parish of Norton, New Brunswick.
1895: An Act Respecting the Property of Married Women showed a dramatic transformation in New Brunswick women’s legal rights, including “Married women may hold real and personal property” and have “full control of property, possessed at time of marriage or acquired after.”
1917: I took the liberty of changing the date of the second reading to the women’s enfranchisement bill. The actual mobbing of a member of the legislative assembly occurred in June 1917, when a private member’s bill calling for women’s enfranchisement went into second reading. After being roundly expected to pass, it was voted down.
1919: Women gained the right to vote in provincial elections in New Brunswick.
1920: The Dominion Elections Act was amended so that every “eligible” Canadian over the age of twenty-one, male or female, could vote in federal elections.
1929: Women became “persons.” On October 18, 1929, the word “person” in Section 24 of the British North America Act was finally understood to mean men and women, in a ruling overturning the Supreme Court of Canada by Canada’s then highest court, the Privy Council in England. Lord Sankey announced: “The exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours.”
1934: A bill passed, allowing women to hold provincial office in New Brunswick.
1939: The Child Migration program was ended in England.
1967: The first female member, Brenda Robertson, was elected to the New Brunswick legislature.
2010: British prime minister Gordon Brown apologized to Home Children: “We are sorry that instead of caring for them, this country turned its back. And we’re sorry that the voices of these children were not always heard, their cries for help not always heeded.”
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REFERENCE MATERIAL:
For those interested in learning more about Home Children and women’s lives in the late 1800s, here are some of the books I am indebted to:
Re Home Children:
Sean Arthur Joyce, Laying the Children’s Ghosts to Rest: Canada’s Home Children in the West (Hagios Press, 2014); Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980); Phyllis Harrison, ed., The Home Children (Watson and Dwyer, 1979); Kenneth Bagnell, The Little Immigrants: The Orphans Who Came to Canada (The Dundurn Group, 2001); Marjorie Kohli, The Golden Bridge: Young Immigrants to Canada, 1833–1939 (Natural Heritage Books, 2003).
Re paupers and small town life:
Grace Aiton, The Story of Sussex and Vicinity (Kings County Historical Society, 1967, ’71, ’79); Elaine Ingalls Hogg, Historic Sussex (Nimbus Publishing, 2010); K. Wayne Vail, Yesteryear Sussex.
Re women and suffrage:
Gail G. Campbell, I Wish to Keep a Record: Nineteenth-Century New Brunswick Women Diarists and Their World (University of Toronto Press, 2017); Janet Guildford and Suzanne Morton, eds., Separate Spheres: Women’s Work in the 19th-Century Maritimes (Acadiensis Press, 1994); Mary Hallett and Marilyn Davis, Firing the Heather: The Life and Times of Nellie McClung (Fifth House Publishers, 1993); Constance Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Women’s Press, 1991).
Online and archival materials:
I used too many archival and online sources to list, but here are some of the most valuable: Shannon M. Riske’s dissertation (University of Maine) “In Order to Establish Justice”: The Nineteenth Century Woman Suffrage Movements of Maine and New Brunswick; Elspeth Tulloch’s “We, the Undersigned”: A Historical Overview of N B Women’s Political and Legal Status 1784–1984; and The Report of the Royal Commission on the Relationship of Capital and Labor [sic] in Canada (NB, 1889).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the following for help with an early (very different) draft of this novel: Steve Goudreau, David Lutz, David Macmillan, Don McAlpine, Amber McAlpine, and the staff of the New Brunswick Museum Archives.
The Sister’s Tale was immeasurably helped by the following: David G. Bell, University of New Brunswick professor emeritus, for answering many questions about “intestacy and the widow”; Bev Harrison, former Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, for historical legislative protocol; David Mawhinney, Mount Allison archives, re women students in the late 1800s; the staff of the Sussex Regional Library for help with microfilm of The Kings County Record; Francesca Holyoke, University of New Brunswick archives, for advice and information re women’s lives; Gregory Marquis, University of New Brunswick Saint John, re nineteenth-century policing and historical spelling; Peter Larocque, New Brunswick Museum, for answering endless odd questions; and most of all, Janice Cook at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, who listened, pondered, searched and supplied me with the key. Deepest thanks to all.
At Knopf Canada, thanks to the terrific team: my publishers, Anne Collins and Martha Kanya-Forstner, as well as publishing director Lynn Henry, managing editor Deirdre Molina, designer Talia Abramson (love the boots!) and publicist Sharon Gill.
Thanks to Tilman Lewis for a meticulous copy edit and Angelika Glover for careful proofreading.
Enormous thanks to my brilliant editor, Craig Pyette, who worked on this novel during the unprecedented stresses of the coronavirus pandemic. Heartfelt thanks for unwavering commitment to finding the deepest levels of The Sister’s Tale, for helping me tell the story in the best possible way, and for laughter, challenges and friendship.
To my dearest agent, Jackie Kaiser, thanks once again for truthful advice through many drafts, steering me down that most turbulent river towards the next novel, steadfast with comfort, encouragement, determination and love.
Thanks to my family: Jake, Sara, Maeve, Bridget, Mark, Beverly, and most of all my beloved mother, Alison Davis, at ninety-seven vibrant and strong, publishing her memoir, giving workshops, bright-voiced on the telephone—so far away and yet so close to me.
To my husband, Peter. Always, everywhere, sharing, seeing, understanding—my eyes, my ears, my heart, my soul.
BETH POWNING’S previous books include the bestselling novels The Hatbox Letters, The Sea Captain’s Wife, and most recently A Measure of Light, a Globe and Mail Best Book and winner of the inaugural New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction. Her works of memoir include Home: Chronicle of a North Country Life; Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss; and Edge Seasons: A Mid-life Year. In 2010, Beth was awarded New Brunswick’s Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for High Achievement in English-Language Literary Arts. She lives on a farm near Sussex, New Brunswick, with her husband, the renowned sculptor Peter Powning. Learn more at www.powning.com/beth. Follow Beth on Facebook @bethpowningauthor, Instagram @bethpowning and Twitter @bethpowning.