Elsie Fry Laurence - Collected Poetry and Selected Prose

Margaret Laurence blazed a trail as a Canadian woman author, yet she credited her mother-in-law, Elsie Fry Laurence (1893-1982), more than writers like Virginia Woolf, 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 to Margaret Laurence's fiction, archival research, and a contextualization of her works among those of other 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.