Transatlantic Letters and Settler Identities: Jane White Writes to Ireland, 1849–1865

Abstract

This article reads one side of a transatlantic correspondence, that of Irish emigrant Jane White, who relocated to Canada in 1849, during a time of high migration from Ireland to Canada. The point of reading her one-sided correspondence is because it challenges scholars in both material and theoretical ways. Jane’s letters are a richly complicated source for such an undertaking, allowing readers to assess the impact of material circumstances and the “mechanics of colonization” as they shape and inform the epistolary platform upon which Jane White rehearses Protestant and middle-class identities. These identity affiliations—which act as connective tissue to the land of her birth, and which she reinforces in letter writing—are concretely tied to the processes of colonization and settlement, but complicated by being Irish. Despite the relative comfort of her family, Jane’s letters to Eleanor Wallace reveal a young Irish woman struggling to maintain her identity in the face of prejudice. The following examination of her letters suggests ways of situating the personal letter in settler histories by focusing on Jane White’s engagement with questions of identity, social status, and colonial relations within the epistolarium, the discursive world that is shaped by and created within the dialogic field of the letter and the material factors of its creation.