(Un)Building the Nation: Mary Leslie's The Cromaboo Mail Carrier

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges facing early Canadian writers of fiction was that of adapting Old World patterns to New World settings. Carole Gerson puts the case succinctly when she notes, in Purer Taste, that many writers overcompensated for their colonial insecurity by cramming their pages with an astonishing array of romantic conventions ? an overcompensation that often produced ragged, patchwork hybrids (90). During the Confederation period, especially, and the couple of decades after, a heightened sense of nationalism fostered a surge of literature dedicated to exploring the viability of Canada as a setting for fiction. Out of this movement came such works as Rosanna Leprohon's Quebec romance, Antoinette de Mir ecourt (1864), William Kirby's The Golden Dog (1877), also set in old Quebec, Graeme Mercer Adam and Ethelwyn Wetherald's An Algonquin Maiden (1887), and Gilbert Parker's immensely popular Seats of the Mighty (1896). Indeed, these novelists found that the events of Canada's past provided rich material with which to meet the prevailing literary taste for romance.1 Mary Leslie's only novel, The Cromaboo Mail Carrier (1878), published in Guelph, Ontario, under the pseudonym James Thomas Jones, also promises to be a romance. Subtitled A Canadian Love Story, the novel proposes to tell the tale of a mail coach driver and his lady love. At the same time, though, the novel is shockingly realistic in its portrayal of rural Ontario. In fact, the residents of Erin, near which Leslie lived, reputedly saw too accurate a description of their village in the novel and had the book withdrawn from circulation as libellous. Leslie went on to produce a witty but tame volume of poetry, Rhymes of the Kings and Queens of England (1896), and another of mixed