Book Review for Seeking Our Eden on Acadiensis

Seeking our Eden: The Dreams and Migrations of Sarah Jameson Craig by Joanne Findon, was recently reviewed by Linda Kealey on Acadiensis. The Acadiensis blog is an essential source for reading and research on the history of Atlantic Canada.

The following is an excerpt from the review:

Seeking Our Eden provides an engrossing account of a 19^th-century woman born and raised in rural New Brunswick. The author, English professor Joanne Findon, is Sarah’s great-granddaughter. As Findon explains, reading Sarah’s diaries (1865-1889 and 1902-1919) and a memoir helped her to understand how unique and determined her great-grandmother was in the context of her time; Sarah grew up in the backwoods with no formal education and in hardscrabble poverty. Yet early on she devoured whatever books and magazines she could obtain. At the age of 14 she ran away to St. Andrews, NB naively thinking that she could draw upon family friends for funds to become a writer and perhaps escape a life of domestic drudgery. Although ultimately she returned home, her ambition to become a writer never faded. Through periodicals brought from the United States by her brother she became acquainted with various reform movements including hydropathy (or water cure), dress reform, and utopianism.

Findon reflects on this story in a very personal way drawing comparisons to her own mother’s scrimping and saving to attend Normal school to become a teacher and thus the most highly educated member of her family at the time. Like her great grandmother, Sarah’s grandmother (who typed up the handwritten memoir composed in Sarah’s later years), possessed a critical edge and sometimes a hurtful tongue which caused tensions between them and delayed Findon’s reading of the diaries and memoir until adulthood. Sarah’s love of writing, her intellectual engagement with the reform movements of her day, and her lifelong struggle with poverty resonate with Findon who has brought Sarah to life in vivid detail. Read the full review on Acadiensis >

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