Elsie Fry Laurence

Margaret Laurence blazed a trail as a female Canadian author, yet it was her mother-in-law, Elsie Fry Laurence (1893–1982), more than writers like Virginia Woolf, whom she credited for establishing a model of authorship that she could emulate – one grounded in western Canada and equally committed to writing books, raising children, and attending to the realities of everyday life.

This is the first book-length study devoted to the life and work of Elsie Fry Laurence, a poet and accomplished novelist who played a formative role in defining literary life in Canada between the world wars and into the postwar period. A complete reading of Fry Laurence’s oeuvre sets the foundational premise for the book, along with interviews with her daughter, correspondence with her grandchildren, a comparison with Margaret Laurence’s fiction, archival research, and a contextualization of her works among those of Canadian and Indigenous poets and filmmakers. The second half of the volume brings together all of the poetry Fry Laurence published in book form, a substantial selection of poems from newspapers and magazines, and her complete short fiction, excluding only her two novels. The works explore women’s roles in creating homes and sustaining communities while confronting grief, loneliness, war, and the anxieties of the nuclear age. Fry Laurence’s writing is shaped by a regional history marked by early twentieth-century settlement, the displacement and persistence of Dakelh and Nehiyawak peoples, and the complex cultural entanglements that continue to define the region today.

In recovering Fry Laurence’s work, Eli MacLaren restores attention to the place-based forces that shaped western Canadian women’s writing, thus reanimating contemporary approaches to Canadian literary study.