Largely uncelebrated as a poet and writer of fiction during her life, since her death in relative poverty at the age of 36 in 1887 Isabella Valancy Crawford has become one of the most-widely anthologized writers of nineteenth-century English Canada, and one of a handful of early Canadian women writers whose work is regularly studied in Canadian universities. Although Crawford was a prolific writer across many genres, publishing numerous lyrics in Toronto newspapers and short stories in American and Canadian periodicals, as well as working on at least a dozen novels, her canonization in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first has been based primarily on the long narrative poem Malcolm's Katie: A Love Story. This poem, …
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