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From Vol. 78, No. 8, October 2007 —
"Academic chit-chat has led to a forgotten Toronto-set novel being republished and given new scholarly consideration – it just took a while.
Twelve years ago, Dalhousie University history professor Suzanne Morton came across The Torontonians, by Ontario author Phyllis Brett Young. Published in 1960, the novel details the life of a housewife in 1950s Toronto. Morton began using it in a small Canadian women’s history seminar, where she and the students shared one copy between them. "Historians interested in women’s experience often draw upon fiction as a way to get insights not available in more traditional sources," Morton says.
The Torontonians was first published by Longmans, Green and Company, receiving a glowing review from The New York Times and a mixed review from The Globe and Mail. The Ontario-based Young, who was born in 1914, wrote four novels, one fictionalized childhood memoir, and a thriller under the pseudonym Kendal Young, all released between 1959 and 1969. Her books were published in Canada, the U.S., and across Europe, and her novel The Ravine was made into a movie.
Fast-forward to 2007. Morton is now teaching at McGill University, and on a lunch date with McGill associate dean of arts Nathalie Cooke, the two compare notes about which Canadian novels they are using in their classes. Realizing their selections were completely different, Cooke reads The Torontonians and comes to think it would be "a wonderful addition" to classes in literature, history, sociology, and women’s studies. Cooke had also been the co-editor of the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series for McGill-Queen’s University Press, and she and Morton dream up the idea of an MQUP reissue of The Torontonians. "[Executive director] Phil Cercone didn’t hesitate for a moment. I discussed it with him one day, and he basically agreed on the spot," Cooke says. "So Suzanne and I started our sleuthing."
The professors track down the rights, which have been held by Young’s daughter Valerie Argue since the author died in 1996. Supportive of the new edition, Argue agrees to provide a foreword and photographs, providing "a glimpse into the world of a bestselling Canadian novelist in the mid-20th century – when bestselling Canadian women novelists were as rare as trees above the tree line," Cooke says.
Voilà: an October fiction title for MQUP. The new edition of the novel also features an introduction from its champion professors, who plan to teach the book in some of their classes. And York University professor Amy Lavender Harris will also use parts of the reissued book for her undergraduate course on Toronto literature. Harris also runs the Imagining Toronto project, which tracks references to the city in literature, and previously wrote about The Torontonians on her blog. She seem The Torontonians as "remarkably prescient" about subsequent Toronto issues and literature, from Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman to Russell Smith’s angst – "it’s an essential book about Toronto," Harris says – as well as of the crisis of the middle-class woman unveiled three years after Young’s book in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
But there was still a small hitch for the press: how do you promote a novel without its author? In response, MQUP publicist Jacqueline Davis created a trivia contest featuring 10 questions about 1950s and ‘60s Toronto and negotiated a stay at Toronto’s Fairmount Royal York Hotel for the grand prize. "The idea was to attract people that are interested in looking at that era of Toronto history to do the research on the questions and get them interested about the information provided in the book," Davis says. The hotel, which is referred to in the novel, was happy to donate a one-night stay for the contest, Davis says. Contest winners were to be announced on Oct. 1, to coincide with the novel’s release."
– Megan Grittani-Livingston
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