Discovering Lily Lewis: A Canadian Journalist and New Woman

Abstract

IN SEPTEMBER, 1888, TWO YOUNG CANADIAN JOURNALISTS, Sara Jeannette Duncan, originally from Brantford, Ontario, and Lily Lewis, of Montreal, headed west on the CPR, beginning a trip that would take them to points in western Canada, to Japan, India, Egypt, and eventually to England. Both had obtained commissions to send regular articles to prominent newspapers in eastern Canada, writing under already well-known pseudonyms: Duncan as Garth Grafton for the Daily Star and Lewis as for the Toronto paper The Week. Neither returned to Canada to live. Duncan settled in India and has been increasingly recognized for her novels, stories, and sketches, her first published work being A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World By Ourselves, a partially fictionalized account of the world tour. Lewis has been almost entirely forgotten or misremembered as Duncan's fictional Orthodocia. According to Canadian bibliographer Henry Morgan, Lewis lived in Paris following the tour, at least until 1912, and continued to publish a variety of work. Almost nothing has been known about her personal life, however, and her work prior to and following the tour has received no critical attention. In the pages that follow, I begin to redress that neglect. I became interested in Lily Lewis when I discovered just how absent she was from sources of information about Canadian women writers of her time, and several years ago began a dissertation project hoping to learn something about Lily Lewis's life and recover as much as I could of her later writing. Duncan's and Lewis's accounts of their journey in the Star and The Week, respectively, were easily accessible when I began my project. Also readily available were thirty-three sketches by Louis Lloyd published in The Week between November 1887 and September 1888 under the heading Montreal Letter, a regularly-appearing column in which Lloyd describes and comments upon people, places, and current culture in Montreal. The following entry from Henry Morgan's Men and Women of the Time, published in 1912, describes Lily Lewis's career as an author as she would have described it to him: Rood, Mrs. Lily, author, D. late John Lewis, Surveyor of Customs, b. and d. there; wrote for The Week and other Can. Publications, under the nom de plume of Lloyd; went round the world and subsequently wrote descriptive articles about the journey; later, went to Egypt with the Princess Gortchakow-Stonrdza, a daughter of the Russian Chancellor, going up the Nile to Dongola, where no white woman had ever been before; published an account of this expedition in a French review; has written for other newspapers and mags. in Paris and London, including Gagliani's (sic) Messenger, the Paris Temps, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Budget, London World, London Times and St. James Gazette; also the Boston Transcript and N.Y. Bookman in Am.; published a remarkable character sketch of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, late Presdt. of the New Salon (1895), and since then a little book of Japanese sketches; m. Roland Rood, s. Prof. Ogden Rood, Columbia Coll., has lived for many years at Paris.--9 Quai Voltaire, Paris, France. 1912. (1) In what has proved to be the only critical commentary about Lily Lewis that I have encountered, Marian Fowler, in Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan, and Thomas Tausky, in Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist of Empire, refer briefly to some of Lewis's articles from the world tour in conjunction with their critical and biographical writing about Duncan. Fowler speculatively presents a Lily Lewis rather less assertive than her companion, a modest Lily who habitually stayed in the background (153), but who shared with Duncan a youthful joie de vivre and ... a keen sense of humour (149). Tausky, too, sees both dissimilarities and shared sentiments, and attributes to Lily more flexibility of mind and greater cultural sensitivity (63). …