Just because there is a collector for almost anything under the sun, so there is likely to be, somewhere, a collector of the literary works of the Canadian writer May Agnes (Early) Fleming (1840- 1880). Her books are easily found in a variety of states and editions and can be acquired cheaply. Nevertheless, her work remains virtually uncollected, especially when compared to that of the literary Strickland sisters, C. P. Traill and Susanna Moodie, whose lives and work have attracted the attention of collectors for nearly a hundred years. Or, for that matter, Fleming’s nearer contemporary Isabella Valancy Crawford (1850- 1887).  No more than fifty highly collectable copies of her single bookOld Spookses’ Pass, Malcolm’s Katie, and Other Poemssurvive; a particularly handsome copy sold recently to a specialist collector for several thousand dollars. However, you can easily find a first edition Fleming for less than twenty. Crawford’s grave in Little Lake Cemetery in Peterborough, Ontario, is marked by a handsome Celtic cross placed there by her admirers.  Fleming lies buried somewhere in Brooklyn, N. Y., whence she moved from her home in St. John, New Brunswick.

There are, of course, perfectly good reasons to study and collect Traills and Moodies and Crawfords.  The Stricklands’ work reports everyday pioneer life in Upper Canada-- you get to see a boozy barn raising and meet the Indians who stop by the cabin to say hello; you discover Susanna didn’t think much of Yankees or the Irish.  You find out what went wrong-- why the house burned down or a child drowned.  You wonder at the Aurora’s green reflection on a snow-covered lake.  Susanna, who as a young woman transcribed the personal history of the escaped slave Mary Prince, is something of a blue-stocking, given to moral calculations and not a little outrage at the general state of things.  Catharine Parr, the amateur botanist, is perpetually sunny and given to a watery positivism (“Everything,” she seems to say, “will be all right when the blue-birds return in the Spring”); her image in our cultural imagination matches the one in the famous photograph-- she is pictured setting on the ivy-draped porch, her cheery old face framed in lace, darning sox. The educated voices we hear in the Stricklands’ writing were tuned in a genteel but impoverished household, out in the fragrant English countryside, but things get really interesting when these sensibilities are transported to the stump lots of  Upper Canada (One book about the sisters has a perfect title, The Embroidered Tent).  So their books are not mere quotidian reports of wood-chopping, soap-making, and berry-picking.  Crawford, equally genteel and equally impoverished,  struggled with the hegemony of Victorian poetic convention and searched for language capable of authentic, passionate expression. She would have liked Gerard Manley Hopkins.

But I think there is another reason why these writers figure prominently in the Canadian literary landscape while May Agnes Fleming is generally ignored by collectors and literary scholars. When it came to earning money, Susanna Moodie, C. P. Traill, and Isabella Valancy Crawford were just about perfect failures.  None succeeded in earning much from their writing and eked out a living. The small Canadian market bought little and paid less for their work; American publishers, unhindered by copyright law, happily pirated their work or just paid peanuts. There was a bit of money, perhaps, from England where Agnes Strickland, the influential author of  popular works on the monarchy, managed to get her sisters’ work published and paid for.  Isabella Crawford’s publisher, Bain, sold but fifty copies of her first and only book Old Spookses’ Pass, and at the end of her short life she relied on a tiny, sporadic income earned writing serialized fiction, short stories and filler verses for popular magazines. And earning money was important to all three writers. Thomas Traill’s failed investments and incompetent farm management drove his family down into poverty which C. P.’s writing barely relieved, and the political career of Moodie, as Susanna called her husband, was wrecked in the partisan jealousies and rivalries of Hastings County where he served for a time as sheriff (a position to which he had been appointed  on the strength of a pleading letter Susanna had written to the Lt. Governor). These three wrote in hope of release from penury and in that they were heroic, if not victorious. 

May Agnes Fleming (born Early) is not nearly so well known or celebrated, but she certainly managed to be better paid.  In her time she was the best paid author in Canada, earning more than $10,000 a year in the 1870’s.  She “was a master of the minor convention in which she wrote: the suspense-laden serial tale of high life in England and America. Her characters and incidents were simple and stereotyped, but her plots were as ingenious and satisfying as those of Wilkie Collins, and her writing style was vigorous and direct” (Cogswell, Canadian Biography). An interesting new character appears in her later fiction, the private detective.  Her life was not without complication and difficulty, and it was certainly short enough-- estranged from her husband, William Fleming, after ten years of marriage, she supported their four children. But she evidently knew what she was writing and who she was writing for, and at one time or another was under exclusive contract with various successful American and British publishers.  Her career, although it ended at age forty, combines elements of the careers of Anna Jameson (who published extensively on painting) and Agnes Strickland, both of whom achieved literary and financial success at least in part because they lived independent lives. If you want to know what it took to succeed as a writer, and especially as a woman writer, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a collection of first editions of May Agnes Fleming’s fiction would be a good place to start reading.

William Van Nest