Isabella Valancy Crawford

Cecily Devereux (University of Alberta)
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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, which Frank M. Tierney suggests “may have been written between…

2094 words

Citation: Devereux, Cecily. "Isabella Valancy Crawford". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 November 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1066, accessed 20 April 2024.]

1066 Isabella Valancy Crawford 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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