Too Close to Home: Middlebrow Anti-Modernism and the Sentimental Poetry of Edna Jaques

Abstract

This essay is a literary and cultural study of Canada’s bestselling but largely forgotten poet of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Edna Jaques. It argues that Jaques’s preference for sentimental verse and the largely western Canadian, female, and middle-class readership that bought her books combine to relegate Jaques outside of English-Canadian literary history as a middlebrow anti-modernist embarrassment. Examples of her verse are situated in the rhetorical context of sentimental greeting cards and the economic context of female cultural consumption to map the intersections of gender, class, and race in the battles over literary taste and modern nation swirling around Jaques’s popular success and critical failure.