Content area
Full Text
Katherine McKenna's biography of Anne Murray Powell is, as the jacket cover promises, a "captivating story and a great read." It also makes a significant contribution to the historical record in its carefully studied and detailed analysis of upper middle-class society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a period much less rigorously investigated in English Canada than the later Victorian and Edwardian age. Over 65 years ago, Virginia Woolf called for female scholars to write the biographies of ordinary women as a supplement to history, although she assumed that such work would need to be called by "some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety."(f.1) As well as proclaiming the promise of biography to illuminate the intimate connections between the private and public spheres, Woolf's call reminds present-day readers of the degree to which the convention of propriety constrained women and contributed to their historical obscurity. Anne Murray Powell emerges from McKenna's pages as the personification of propriety. Emigrating from England to America in 1771, the young Anne Murray was mortified to discover that her aunt Elizabeth Innis, a successful businesswoman, expected her to learn and help govern the business of a millinery shop. To work in the public sphere went so against the grain of Anne's background and inclinations that over 60 years later she looked backed on this period of her life as one of utmost humiliation and degradation. The difficulties attending her reluctant participation in shop-keeping were resolved by her marriage to William Drummer Powell. The status of wife, and then of mother, was far more in keeping with Anne's sense of propriety than that...