—Miriam Green Ellis, University of Manitoba, 1948

On the occasion of the retirement of Miriam Green Ellis at the age of seventy-three as western editor of the Montreal paper the for over twenty-five years, the past president of the Canadian Women’s Press Club (CWPC), Kennethe Haig, hailed her colleague as that incredible Canadian (Cram 7). The celebration took place in Winnipeg in early January 1953. Ellis had signed on formally in 1913 as a member of the CWPC, which, making history as well as news, claims the longest continuous existence of any professional women journalists’ organization in the world (Jackel 53), and renewed affiliation as a continuous, active member () until her death in 1964. But she was much more than an affiliate. Ellis served as president of the Edmonton branch of the CWPC in 1919 and, in many subsequent roles for this branch, arranged the first CWPC regional conference in Calgary in 1920, served several terms as vice-president of the regional CWPC, and wrote a characteristically informal history of the CWPC, , delivered as a talk at the biennial in Edmonton in 1956. She was more than an organizer, too. The vast scope of her published and always personally coloured articles covers topics ranging from stock prices, farm fairs, prize-winning wheat, and farmer-entrepreneurs to learning to drive and change a tire in 1916, camping in the Rockies, and visiting the fledgling Banff School of Fine Arts. In addition to crisscrossing Western Canada countless times on her aggie beat, she extended her field to observe Atlantic Canada, reporting on ox-pulls, haymaking, cod and lobster fisheries, and coal mining in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island, and ventured as far as Honolulu where, being welcomed as the Dean of Canada’s newspaper women ( n. pag.), she sent back copy about Hawaiian cattle ranches, sugar cane harvests, floral industries, and the active Kilauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes on the Big Island. The largely unmined Ellis Collection, willed to the University of Alberta, contains holograph manuscripts and typewritten manuscripts, two short stories, and the typescript of her journey from Edmonton to Aklavik, Northwest Territories, in June and July 1922, entitled along with 237 photographs, at least half of which were transferred through the technology of the day to coloured glass slides to illustrate her Journey to the Land of the Midnight Sun lectures across Canada and the United States. Watercolour artists with fine sable brushes welcomed the calotype technique of painting and glazing paper-based photographs, which allowed them precision in detailing facial and costume features (Henisch, Heinz, and Henisch 53). The coloured slides of Ellis’s magic lantern shows captured real life (Humphries 24) in novel ways. Photographs of and keepsakes from friends (Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Gertrude Peggy Balmer, E. Cora Hind, and Violet McNaughton among them) add to the trove’s enlivened sense of the West in the first decades of the twentieth century, of a woman making her mark in a male-dominated field, and of the sustaining bonds among press women.

Poring over the contents of the Ellis Collection, an archive made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also from the mad fragments that no one intended to preserve and just ended up there (Steedman 68), has taught me many things about Miriam. A woman of daring, wry humour, and tough-mindedness, a diarist, a writer of non-fiction and fiction, a promoter of rural life and agricultural communities, and a champion of press women who exemplifies their motto, Every Stroke Upward (Rex 1), this incredible Canadian is also a person of mystery. Despite the accessible tenor and subjects of her widely circulated publications and their marks of a strong, determined personality, Ellis herself as an individual subject is less and less fathomable. Elusiveness is actually not the problem; it is, rather, the thread that connects the work of over four decades of the woman who wanted to get in behind the curtain ( 64), but chose not to lift the veil on her own life. The more I considered the feasibility of resurrecting a figure about whom so little has been written (with the exception of excerpts from the 1922 diary introduced by Lisa LaFramboise, and slight mention in studies by Grant MacEwan, Kay Rex, and Marjory Lang) and about whom so many unanswered, or unanswerable, or impertinent questions persist, the less comfortable I became with the self-styled role as revisionist or un-coverer. On the contrary, it seems important to establish a place in literary studies for the press woman not as a mere hack, bereft of the trimmings of non-linear narration, extended metaphorical allusions, or récherché diction. After a necessarily brief biographical sketch, I plan to get in behind the curtain of Ellis’s once widely circulated copy to concentrate on the hidden art of her unpublished work: and the two short stories, and For an annotated, illustrated edition of and a selection of Miriam Green Ellis’s fiction and journalism, see , ed. Patricia Demers (U of Alberta P, 2013). For photographs, coloured glass slides, and items from the Miriam Green Ellis Collection, visit the web exhibit hosted by the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library: www.library.ualberta.ca/specialcollections.

Born in Richville, New York, of Canadian parents, who returned to Canada and the paternal farmstead near Athens, Ontario, where this only child went to school, she later attended Bishop Strachan School in Toronto and graduated from the Toronto Conservatory of Music with an ATCM (Associate of the Toronto Conservatory of Music) diploma. The Green family’s move to Edmonton in 1904 was followed by her marriage to George Ellis in All Saints Anglican in 1905. Inspector of Schools for Edmonton from 1906 to 1908, Ellis, a graduate of Athens High School and Queen’s University, attended the inaugural University of Alberta convocation in the Strathcona Oddfellows’ Hall in 1908, seated next to the minister of education, A.C. Rutherford. George Ellis resigned his position in 1909 to pursue graduate work with Miriam’s accompaniment, likely in Chicago. The next appearance of Miriam in any archive is her role in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, where, in 1912, she started and managed the girls’ hockey team of the Prince Albert Collegiate Institute, where George was principal. Ladies’ hockey was very popular in Saskatchewan, with Regina boasting its first ladies’ team as early as 1896, and the Prince Albert Tumblers in action in 1907 (Zeman 252–53). Based on reports in the , Miriam acquired a considerable reputation as a curler. She also began writing for this local paper, though the lack of bylines makes her contributions impossible to trace. She reported on the 1915 Regina meeting of the Women Grain Growers, a splendid organization, which stands above all for cooperation ( 11), and their mounting campaign for suffrage for the Toronto-based monthly . For a short time, she was a staffer at the before joining Frank Oliver’s , reporting on the legislature, various churches, sports, and agriculture. Miriam’s year as Edmonton president of the CWPC was characterized not only by her preparation of Bohemian refreshments for the soiree[s] ( n. pag.) but also by an engagement with a larger community; speakers and invited guests for the year included Father Drummond of the Jesuit College, Winnipeg press woman E. Cora Hind, whom Ellis introduced as being called on to do the work of three men for half a man’s salary ( n. pag), Dean of Agriculture E.A. Howes, and Acting President William Kerr of the University of Alberta, aesthetic dancer Ruth St. Denis, Premier Charles Stewart, and mountaineer Mary Jobe.

Newspaper articles, correspondence, and typescripts provide some details, but curious gaps or omissions, her distinctive leitmotif, remain. George enlisted as a major in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915. According to his personnel record, he was dismissed in 1916 for misconduct (Veterans Affairs, RG 150 Accession 1992–93 / 166), an unexplained term, and returned to Eastern Ontario, to the Leeds County area of his birth. From 1922 until 1938, he taught at Lisgar Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, while Miriam lived in Edmonton and, later, Winnipeg. No record of a divorce exists. Reporting on all sorts of conventions and often appearing in breeks, Miriam always signed her writing Miriam Green Ellis, yet no obituary or memoir of Miriam mentions George or the childless marriage. In speaking to the University Women’s Club in Saskatoon in 1945, she borrowed a description from her favorite book, to compare herself to Rabbit’s relations: I am the last little relation following the procession and sometimes getting lost ( 18–19). Whether this is an ironic retrospective or tongue-in-cheek candour from a recognizable though discreet personality, who never seemed lost, is arguable.

A reading of her typescript along with the 249 small pages (3.5" x 6") of typed daily diary entries, index of names, and demographic information relating to her 1922 journey to Aklavik testifies to Ellis’s purposiveness, curiosity, and determination. Having failed to convince editor Frank Oliver of readers’ interest in reports of such a trip, with typical boldness she granted herself a leave of absence. She travelled by train to Waterways, the terminus of the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway, south of Fort McMurray, and then by river steamer down the Athabasca, crossing the rapids by car at Smith Portage, and proceeding by steamer north on the Mackenzie to Aklavik.

is full of candid portraits, textual and photographic, of fellow passengers. With a hint of disbelief she describes Gladys Patterson, a girl from Yorkshire, England, going down to marry a chap at Norman whom she has not seen…since the war and of course has not heard from him since last Fall some time, but she does not seem to have any doubts in the matter (4). At the Edmonton train station she meets Bishop Grouard, the Oblate missionary who oversaw the immense vicariate of Athabasca-Mackenzie and brought the first printing press to Athabasca country. He has been in the north for half a century and knows every white man and Indian right down to the Arctic.…He is well over eighty now but still carries on as active head of his big diocese (4–5). Although not photographed, botany professor Roland Holroyd from Pennsylvania State University is initially an instructive source—it will be interesting getting some first hand information about the plants and flowers (4)—but soon proves a disappointment when he refuses or is unable to identify any vegetation. Her frustration with this reclusive passenger is evident when she comments on his attempted moustache, a rather anaemic affair. After weeks of sober living he has suddenly given way to smoking cigarettes, but he does it very genteelly, using a six-inch amber holder. We have warned him to be careful, as dear knows what would grow there if the wooly down were burned off. Poplar comes where spruce has been burned off, we tell him; maybe feather follows down. (35)

Wishing that our fat friend of the Botany department would part with some of the secrets of his profession (44), she resorts to William McCalla’s as a more reliable guide. Her sympathies are engaged for the young Inuit prisoner Alikomiak at Fort McPherson, to be tried and eventually hanged for four murders: The lad looks about sixteen but they say he is nineteen. He says that he did not mean to kill Doak but just shot to wound him and force retaliation (43). On the return journey up south on the Mackenzie, an Inuit woman, Laura, who was being forced to Edmonton to appear before Justice Murphy and possibly confined as insane for having beat her husband, claims Ellis’s sympathy. I suggested that perhaps the husband needed beating up (57), she observes. She presents this portrait of Laura: All day she sits or stands out on the side deck, rolling cigarettes and smoking. When she gets tired standing, she sits flat down on the floor with her legs straight out in front like a baby. That would be a new one to add to the daily dozen and warranted to strengthen the back (59). Ellis is happy to report parenthetically that Laura was found mentally all right and sent back, her worst fault seeming to be that she was an inveterate smoker and also drank when the opportunity offered (57). She encounters and relates tales of survival, like the Pittsburgh native who suffered gangrene, eventually amputated his own toes with a jackknife, and survived alone for over four months with only twenty-five pounds of flour that he mixed with snow, and who now does not want to leave the North.

Thanks to Ellis’s keen eye, is equally adept at documenting topographical conditions. Her text has prescient observations on the tar sands, regular mountains of asphalt (7), used at the time for superior road surfaces, as one day going to mean millions of dollars to the country; despite the opinion of the cracker-box orators (61) on board, squelching one’s enthusiasms that it was just some fool scratching round in the dirt (7), Ellis maintains her visions of another Klondyke (8). She documents Native women’s importance in preparing hides, befriends Native families, notes features of dress, childcare, and diet, and records Native delight in taking pictures of the white visitors. As well as entering mission schools and churches and investigating operating room procedures, such as the one at Fort Simpson, she relays considerable exuberance and vulnerability—in piloting the boat for thirty miles beyond Fort Chipewyan and taking a daily swim in the Mackenzie, admitting to anxiety about mounting her first horse—I cannot understand why they put the stirrups up so high (65)—and, at Salt Springs, a thirty-seven-mile journey inland, revealing the perils of a tenderfoot who deals with blistered feet.

A strong-willed personality suffuses every page of From the outset Ellis chafes at her editor’s apparent lack of interest in her proposed trip to the North Pole, as this episode in early spring illustrates. One day I sat in the Premier’s office trying to get a scoop on the government policy in connection with the administration of the liquor laws, when I noticed on his desk a pamphlet from a transportation company, on which were the words To the land of the midnight sun. From where I sat in that big blue room, I could see the North Saskatchewan River, just then throwing off its winter bondage and shoving the great cakes of ice ignominiously on the shore to rot. The trees were showing life and the grass along the banks was getting green. It was the time the woods sent out their loudest call, and I lost all interest in the burning question of liquor laws. (2) She also strikes a blow for women in breeks, but not without a shamefaced admission. Having put on [her] knickers and big boots…with a defiant air, Ellis is anxious to see what was behind that screen of trees…to penetrate the leafy foliage (7–8). For one time only she concedes to the captain’s directive that he could not think of allowing me to leave the boat, but quickly vows that it won’t happen again (10). Her oath packs conviction: That man is about half as big as I am and I should just have taken him by the collar and thrown him overboard (8). Her trips ashore have a less pugnacious tone, showing an observant naturalist at work. The discovery of wild orchids, the most exquisite things I ever saw, remind her of fairies’ graves (17). Blue-eyed grass, lupines, tea berries, wild strawberries, and the omnipresent pink, rose, and purple drooping blossoms of the Heydesarum mackenzii merit detailed description. So do the never-ending sunsets, liquid light lying on the water (37), a bright rich amber, shading to yellow gold (47). The prospect of a return journey along narrower and shallower rivers, unlike the majesty of the Mackenzie, occasions sadness: it was like the slow unfurling of a great banner, and now we are rolling it up again till it will be just an uninteresting stick (58). Sick of being rushed (64), Ellis rejoices in the reprieve of having missed the boat, meaning that their return is delayed for a few days.

likely composed in the fall of that year and mined successively thereafter for newspaper articles, is a significant and singular contribution to women’s travel accounts dealing with Western Canada and the Arctic. Its distinctive immediacy emerging from Ellis’s journalism experience, also stands apart from the published records of earlier and contemporary women recreational adventurers or professional travel writers, who were supported by family wealth, industrial sponsors or employed, attending husbands. The personal voice, occasional humiliation, and the encounter with a wide social spectrum separate Ellis’s work from the amateur Victorian travelogues of the wives of serving or future Canadian governors-general detailing their cross-country visits with the elite of the Dominion: the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava’s (1891) and the Marchioness of Aberdeen’s (1893). Though incomplete (or at least un-concluded), Ellis’s account is fuller than the report of the American Elizabeth Taylor, a self-taught botanist and collector for museums, who travelled down the Mackenzie in 1892 with the permission of the governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, publishing brief essays two and five years later in and . In addition to Taylor’s timidity about Indian fellow travellers, a rough wild set, about whom she registers feeling a little troubled in having [her] tent pitched so near (Taylor, 51), she fulfils the requirement of the travelling lady in recommending such useful articles as a checked skirt, blouse, felt hat, silk handkerchiefs, moosehide gloves, and black cashmere stockings (Taylor, 60). Ellis’s individual experience and first-person voice distinguish her work from the stereotypes and condescending tone of the essays and stories of Quebec-born Harriet Campbell, Lady Jephson’s (1897), and the fictional first-person narration of Bess Le Ford in Norfolk-born Frances Herring’s portraits of the British Columbia Interior, (1900). Later records of travel show considerably less travail than Ellis’s account. Jean Walker Godsell’s description of her 1920 honeymoon trip north as a Hudson’s Bay Company factor’s wife, in (1959), sketches God’s Wide Open Spaces where men were men and where white women were placed on pedestals since they were few in number and far between (Godsell 2).Clara (Rogers) Vyvyan’s 1926 journey by steamer, motor boat, and canoe to Alaska published thirty-five years later as (1961), a carefully planned and guided trip, reflects the aspirations of a well-to-do, middle-aged Englishwoman and her female artist-companion as they read Shakespeare to one another en route.

The journey most comparable to Ellis’s is Agnes Deans Cameron’s arrival at Fort Rae in 1908, recounted in (1909), a text that Ellis’s informal history of the CWPC reveals she knew. That book came back at me like a boomerang, Ellis revealed to her Edmonton audience : When I went down the Mackenzie in 1922, the natives clammed up on me when I said I wanted to write about them. Seems Cameron had borrowed precious photographs and failed to return them, as promised (Ellis, 8).

Aside from competing claims about being the first to visit Salt Springs, the biggest differences between these two accounts are their scope and tone. With each of its twenty-four chapters headed by a literary or biblical epigraph, is a precisely worded, photo-illustrated narrative of close to four hundred pages, recounting the journey of Cameron and her niece, an accommodating typist, from Chicago to the North, via stagecoach, scow, steamer, and paddle-wheeler, with a return terminus in Winnipeg. The text directly links a photographic first to a technology of textual representation—the typewriter (Roy, 212). Although not all the photographs were taken by Cameron or Miss Jessie Cameron Brown, it is quite possible, as Wendy Roy suggests, that Underwood either donated the typewriter or helped to fund the trip and was rewarded by having its corporate name prominently displayed ( 73). Cameron (1863–1912) was not officially a press woman; rather, as a teacher for twenty-five years and the first woman high school principal in Victoria, she had run afoul of the school board trustees and been dismissed. Journalism in Chicago and the trip north, along with its resultant lectures in Britain and the United States promoting immigration, provided her livelihood before her untimely death. In the opinion of Anglican missionary Archdeacon Charles Whittaker, was an intricate compound of fact and fiction (MacLaren and LaFramboise xxix).

Instead of splitting hairs over truth claims separating the journalist and the educator, a more revealing yet delicate comparison involves the tone of both accounts. Acutely conscious of her role as instructive authority over curious observer, Cameron is quick to impart anthropological lessons. Among Mackenzie tribes no Yellow-Knife, Dog-Rib, or Slavi starved while another had meat, no thievish hand despoiled the cache of another. A man’s word was his bond, and a promise was kept to the death. Not all the real things of life are taught to the Cree by the Christian. Courage is better than culture, playing the game of more importance than the surface niceties of civilisation, to be a man now of more moment than to hope to be an angel hereafter. (Cameron 199) In contrast to Ellis’s awestruck directness, the vision of sunset at the Ramparts, the entrance to Fort Good Hope, provokes a Romantic effusion from Cameron, in which duelling emphases on aloneness and impressive pronouncement frame the scene. Awed and uplifted, our one wish is to be alone; the vision that is ours for one hour of this Arctic night repays the whole summer’s travel. The setting of the picture is that ineffable light, clear yet mellow, which without dawn and without twilight rises from the flowing river to starless heavens, and envelopes the earth as with a garment—the light that never was on sea or land. We could not have chosen a more impressive hour in which to pass the portal into the Arctic World. (Cameron 206) While the differences in length and aim between a typescript and a published volume might challenge the feasibility of this comparison, what emerges as significant are the palpable contrasts in tone between the teacher at ease in lecturing and the journalist pursuing human interest.

Ellis’s two short stories, another unique offshoot of the journey north, have no parallel in the subsequent work of other women travellers. These narratives probe Native–white relations with a remarkable willingness to see and articulate both sides of the emotionally fraught issues of identity and belonging. A tautly narrated exploration of dissociation, follows the thoughts and escape routes of a hunted man wanted for murder ten years earlier. Moving from the Crowsnest Pass to the Nahanni River in the Northwest Territories, it highlights the man’s terror of uncertainty, his realization of betrayal from so many others, and the surprising sympathy his death evokes in the Native girl he has abducted. For Carson, the man on the run, fear is an embodied presence: But fear, ingrowing and unceasing, gripped him in its coils, like the devilfish, its victim. As time passed, its clutches grew stronger and stronger, till he wondered how much longer he could withstand the vicious monster (1).

The domestic and emotional details Ellis introduces to her portrait of this terrifying grip create a poignant sense of estrangement and alienation. With the passage of years, Carson’s promise to his childhood sweetheart in England, Have your sheets and tablecloths all hemmed, and I will be back for you in two years (3) and his plans for a home with no rent to pay to greedy landlords (4) fade to impossibility. As he risks journeys to Vancouver and San Francisco, his attempt to track down the double-crossing prospector, his supposed partner, shows the gullibility to which loneliness has reduced him and confirms that his stake and money are both lost. The shocking act of abduction testifies to Carson’s desperation and muddled thinking: he must have her for his own; if her people pursued, as they doubtless would, he would fly with her. He had eluded the police for ten years; he could elude them too (19–20). However, is not a rape narrative, nor does it illustrate what we would today call the Stockholm Syndrome. Ellis succeeds in complicating both victim and perpetrator. Though terrified and unable to communicate, the girl realizes that this man did not mean to hurt her (21). As the narrator explains for her, an Indian maiden could read the tenderness in his eyes, yearning blue eyes so unlike those of the indifferent men of her tribe (20). Despite escaping to the far side of the river, the girl screams, runs, and wades into the river to try to stop the raft on which Carson, who has abandoned hope, is careening toward the rapids. Managing to pull his lifeless body to shore, she cradles his head and lies down by his side. In death, he was not alone (24).

may have been prompted by Ellis’s silent question about Gladys Patterson’s blithe happiness en route to marry her long-separated fiancé. In her story, the sheltered English war bride arrives in Edmonton to start a romantic new life of genteel farming, only to be shocked and horrified by the realization that her beloved Canadian husband, whom she nursed back to health in France, is Native. The bride’s immediate revulsion, her change from love to hate, and refusal to listen to any explanation are strong indictments of prevailing prejudices. The contrast between Rose’s professed love and readily upturned lips (Chap. 2, 1) at the Edmonton train station when the couple is reunited at last and her silent petulance hours later casts doubt on all her declarations. The subtlety of the narrative inheres both in the warm relationship between the husband and his mother, who has educated him and kept the subsistence farm going in his absence, and the delayed disclosure about true parentage. Although Ellis works hard to air the views and desires of both sides of this doomed partnership, she spends most time dissecting John’s interior dilemma and ambivalence, torn between his duty to his mother and his love for his wife (Chap. 2, 5). Rose constantly questions, extracting protestations of fidelity and explanations about a beloved collie: You do love me, do you not? and Was there another girl, John? (Chap. 1, 4), Who is Flossie? You talked of her all night in your sleep (Chap. 2, 3). Afraid that Rose would not understand (Chap. 2, 5) and shiver[ing] in dread at the outcome (Chap. 2, 1), John makes the effort to see matters from Rose’s uninformed and judgemental perspective: He was not ashamed of it, but how would it seem to an English girl who knew nothing of Indians except such as she had read in Cooper’s novels. But, he defended himself again, he could not tell her of himself without seeming to cast a slur on that mother, who had done so much for him (Chap. 2, 1).

The unnamed Mother reads Rose’s language perfectly: No, she will never understand. I saw the look of horror in her eyes when she saw me (Chap. 3, 2). For her part, Rose recoils in revulsion: Don’t touch me. I hate you…I wish I might have died before this happened (Chap. 3, 5). Possibly echoing the situation of separation in her own life, Ellis’s principals do not get together, yet the current of sexual tension carries through to the final line. The former bride, who is using her stenographer’s salary to start her own chicken business in Edmonton, decides to invest in hens but she would not get a cock till later on (Chap. 5, 9).

Why would work so vivid in its emotional insights, so attuned to the cadences of speech, and so knowledgeably anchored in an Albertan or Arctic setting remain unpublished? What shines through in all Ellis’s work are the candour, admiration for resourcefulness, and fighting spirit of the writer. She was not an observer who kept her distance, but an understanding listener eager to support the underdog. Ironically, despite Ellis’s wide recognition—a farmer at Fort Smith recognized her from the Edmonton Exhibition and a Californian student at the Banff School remembered her from the International Stock Show at Chicago thirteen years earlier—she remains a figure of considerable mystery. The typescript of her journey to Aklavik provided material for over forty newspaper articles. Fiction may have been a more tentative undertaking for Ellis; she may have been stung by rejection or chosen not to consult or prevail on her friend Nellie McClung for a literary contact.

This temperamental fighting spirit, however, does not align her with the contemporary fictional journalist Aleta Dey, the eponymous heroine of Francis Marion Beynon’s largely autobiographical 1919 novel. Pacifist and suffragist, Dey suffers and dies for her principles. She constantly accuses herself of weakness: Why did I find myself apologetic when I did not agree with the majority? When I was given a mind that questioned everything, why was I not given a spirit that feared nothing? (Beynon 66). Combining both a questioning attitude and a fearless brio, Ellis never believed that the wings of [her] soul had been clipped in [her] infancy (Beynon 66).

While it may seem easy to categorize Ellis as fleeing from the perceived boredom of a music teaching career and a failed marriage into the sorority of press women, I think it is important to see beyond these stereotypes. Boldly claiming and ultimately owning the male turf of the aggie beat, resorting to no coy nicknames, not isolating herself as a Lone Scribe (Lang 22) but rather seizing the advantage of the Aklavik trip to negotiate a new position, Ellis experienced the enabling power of a female constituency and exercised genuine resourcefulness in the sometimes hostile terrain of the newspaper world. Yet she recognized with some regret, in the years following the Second World War, that the need for the solidarity of a women-only association was waning. In many ways she is a liminal figure, valuing the pluck of CWPC pioneers and exulting in her own mobility. Her conversational style, so distinct from the didactic literariness of Agnes Deans Cameron, nevertheless blends clarity and opacity, as this public personality protects the secrets of a private individual.