Panel: Class, Gender, Power, and Publication
Copanelists: Cynthia Huff and Gabriele Linke
Members of a middle-class family with unusual gifts in the sciences, politics, and the literary and the entrepreneurial worlds, the McIlwraiths emigrated from Ayrshire, Scotland to Australia and Canada in the mid-nineteenth-century. Several of the Canadian McIlwraiths crossed the border to the United States to work there, some for several decades. Virtually all of them frequently returned to Scotland for visits, and some of them traveled widely in North America, Europe, and the Pacific. At this conference, I would like to report on the careers of two McIlwraith women, Jean and her niece Dorothy, who were required to translate their identities in several different and complex ways when they worked in New York’s publishing world between WWI and WWII.
As Dorothy pointed out in an essay punningly entitled, “Concerning Us Canadians: By One of Minor Importance,” and Jean in an abortive novel, “Casual Camilla,” that unfavourably compared the wartime mores of New York working girls with those of Canadian ones, national and professional identity were often difficult to reconcile. This was especially true for spinsters like Dorothy and Jean, whose identities as women remained stubbornly defined even as they did a man’s job during the two wars. Writing in November 1942 about Dorothy McIlwraith’s editorship of Short Stories magazine, for example, Writers’ Journal praised her for efficiently running “a man’s magazine [that] is read by men of action all over the world,” while remaining “a pleasant, quiet and soft-spoken woman” with a degree in Anglo-Saxon from McGill University.
The stories of these women provide an opportunity to show how auto/biography, identity studies, and diaspora studies are intertwined in the subject of “translation.” The research presented in this paper draws on the McIlwraiths’ voluminous family papers, in private possession.
Eva-Marie Kröller, FRSC, teaches in the Department of English and the Programme of Comparative Liteature at the University of British Columbia. Most recently, she has published the Cambridge Companion of Canadian Literature (2004) and the Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, co-edited with Coral Ann Howells, is in press. With Christoph Irmscher (Indiana University), she is writing a biography of the McIlwraith family.