(The knock did not come. Muffled by the heavy door, its fe...)
The knock did not come. Muffled by the heavy door, its feeble echo was absorbed by the big rooms between the front door and the kitchen. "Well!" said Temperance, "has he gone to Heaven all alive, like fish goes to market, or is he got a stroke?" The cat arched its back against Miss Tribbey's skirts and so shirked the reply which clearly devolved upon it, there is no other living creature visible in the big kitchen.
Joanna Wood was a United Kingdom born fiction writer, who lived and worked in Canada and the United States. She was hailed as a Canadian Charlotte Brontë on the publication of her first novel in 1894.
Background
Joanna Wood was born on December 28, 1867, in Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire, Scotland, United Kingdom. She was a daughter of Robert Wood, a farmer, and Agnes Wood, maiden name Tod, a homemaker. Joanna was the youngest of 11 children. From a family long established in the isolated Scottish village of Slamannan, her father followed tradition to become a farmer, first as a tenant in Stirlingshire and then at Lesmahagow between 1862 and 1869, a period marked by the death of a number of his children from tuberculosis. In 1869, Robert, Agnes, and five surviving offspring followed the eldest son, William, to Irving, New York, United States. They later moved to Ontario, possibly to be closer to Robert's brother John Stanton Wood, who had settled near Guelph. In 1874, Robert purchased The Heights, a large, valuable farm overlooking the Niagara River at Queenston. Once settled, Robert and Agnes Wood became founding members of the Presbyterian church in nearby St. Davids.
Education
Joanna Wood attended St. Catharines Collegiate Institute.
A writer of popular fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Joanna Wood published several novels and short stories. She was featured frequently in Canadian Magazine. Under the pen name Jean d'Arc, she first published short stories in American magazines. She attributed her success to her brother William, her first reader, and a severe critic. Apparently, on his recommendation she sought a publisher, finding in J. Selwin Tait a sympathetic fellow author who encouraged her to write a novel.
Critics compared Wood's first novel, The Untempered Wind, published in 1984, to Thomas Hardy's stories in how it depicts small-town life. Wood's novel Judith Moore; or, Fashioning a Pipe is about a famous singer who falls in love with a Canadian farmer. After much soul-searching, Judith renounces her career and moves to the farm with her new husband. A Daughter of Witches, which also appeared in book form, was serialized in the Canadian Magazine. This story, set in New England, concerns two cousins, the innocent Mabella, and the evil-natured Vashti, who reflects her witch ancestor as she tries to take revenge against her husband.
The tension between cosmopolitanism and regionalism echoes the conflict between boundlessness and constraint in the plots of Wood's novels. They use variations on the love triangle or two-suitors plot common in 19th-century fiction to trace the inward growth of powerful and unconventional heroines confronting the demands of social institutions. Desire, Wood's central theme, is developed through an impressionistic use of landscape to generate powerful symbols. The fallen woman of The untempered wind, true to her vow of love, escapes through the night woods from the harassment of the narrow-minded women of Jamestown (likely modeled on Queenston); the diva of Judith Moore sings like a lark uncaged in an Ontario orchard, in a reworking of the plot of Corinne, ou l'Italie (a de Staël novel), which dramatizes the conflict for women between artistic triumph and romantic fulfillment. These works bow to the convention by ending with marriage. Wood's next two novels, A Daughter of Witches and Farden Ha', deal with the disruptive effects of passion on the institution of marriage. The two novellas published in Tales from Town Topics (New York) highlight the decadent aspect of Wood's fiction: A Martyr to Love (1897) recounts the adventures of a femme fatale ironically wounded in her heartless conquests, while Where Waters Beckon (1902) draws symbolically on Niagara's whirlpools and local Indian legends as the setting for a dark tale of a woman married off to a madman by her father and later destroyed with her lover, an engineer developing hydroelectricity.
Some of Wood's notable short stories indicate her mastery of many different forms of popular fiction. The Last Cock Fight in San Mateo is set in the Southwest; A Martyr to Love is a potboiler about a New York courtesan; her last known story, Where Waters Beckon, takes place near the Niagara River and the falls and exalts romantic love. Her short stories are divided between controlled ironic renderings of local events centered on strong female characters, and masculine adventure stories from a Mexican series, which use legend and setting to create atmosphere and suspense. Unto the Third Generation, published anonymously in All the Year Round (London) in 1890 but attributed to Wood, recounts the effect on a young man of the revelation that his mad mother is locked up in a West Indian house, a topic with similarities to Jane Eyre. Among Wood's unlocated stories, The Lynchpin Murders (announced in the Niagara Times in 1898) suggests that Wood continued to experiment with new fictional forms until she abruptly stopped publishing in 1902. Her last recorded publication is a topical poem, The Man in the Ranks, in the St. Catharines Standard sometime between 1914 and 1917.
Joanna Wood spent some time in France and the United States and may have been presented at the English court, where she met the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. In her writing, Wood espoused his aesthetics, with their fin de siècle decadence. Like him, she attempted to fuse the sensual with the spiritual through symbolism. In 1908, she lectured to the Niagara Historical Society: she gave talks on Reminiscences of Queenston and Impressions of Europe.
Achievements
At the pinnacle of her career in 1901, Wood was the highest-paid Canadian fiction writer. Her work was also a critical success, especially her first two novels. She won several literary awards in New York. In 1988, Joanna Wood was celebrated in an article in the Canadian Magazine (Toronto) as one of Canada's "three leading novelists."
Some United States' critics recognized the feminist argument in Joanna Wood's critique of patriarchal authority constraining women's desire. However, they made a distinction between the "unconventional theories" in her writing and her fondness for "feminine frivolities" in her clothing. Current Literature (New York) insisted in 1894 that she was no "woman's-righter."
Membership
Joanna Wood joined the Niagara Historical Society in 1907. In 1914, she became an absentee member of society.
Niagara Historical Society
,
Canada
1907
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
According to the Niagara Falls Evening Review in 1927, Wood had suffered a nervous breakdown some years before which had compelled her to abandon her writing.
Connections
Joanna Wood wasn't married. After her mother's death in February 1910, she resided with her brother William, then a life insurance agent in New York City, and later in Freeport, New York. She subsequently spent time with her sisters Mary Glennie in LaSalle, New York, and Jessie Maxwell in Detroit.
Father:
Robert Wood
Mother:
Agnes Wood
Brother:
William Wood
Sister:
Mary Glennie
Sister:
Jessie Maxwell
Sister:
Agnes Wood
Friend:
Janet Carnochan
Janet Carnochan received a first-class provincial normal school certificate from Toronto Normal School and went on to teach at Brantford Union School and then at Kingston's Wellington Street public school. She remained at this school for five years, until her mother's illness necessitated her return home to manage her parents' household. After her mother recovered, Carnochan taught for a year in a rural school near Peterborough. But when the principal's position at the Niagara public school became vacant, she applied for the job and, upon being accepted, returned home in 1872. Two years after a new high school building in Niagara was completed in 1876, Carnochan joined its staff, and she remained there until her retirement in December 1900.
While teaching school, Janet Carnochan also channeled considerable energy into travel and voluntary work. She turned her experience of being shipwrecked off Sable Island, N.S., while en route to Britain in 1879 into a narrative that appeared in the Canadian Methodist Magazine (Toronto and Halifax) three years later. After her return to Niagara in 1872, she had become active in St Andrew's Church, teaching in its Sunday school and helping to raise funds for the church. She also sat on the board of managers from 1892 to 1895 and was secretary of the women's missionary society from 1887 until her death in 1926. In addition to her church work, Carnochan served on the board of the Niagara Public Library as secretary and treasurer and from time to time as a temporary librarian. In 1893, she was chosen as one of 20 Canadian women to attend the World's Congress of Representative Women in Chicago.
Though schoolteaching occupied more than 40 years of Janet Carnochan's life, it is her informal educational work as a local and regional historian, historical preservationist, and museum director that is remembered today. She began making forays into historical writing in the 1890s with accounts of Niagara's Anglican and Presbyterian churches, and throughout the rest of her life, she continued to contribute articles and deliver papers on historical subjects. In 1895, Carnochan became the president of the newly established Niagara Historical Society (NHS). She would be a leading figure in the society until 1925, serving as president, corresponding secretary, and editor of its reports and publications.
After her retirement from teaching in 1900, Carnochan was even more involved in historical activities. She became curator of the NHS's collections in 1901 and spearheaded its drive for the construction of Memorial Hall. Opened in 1907, it was the first building erected as a museum in Ontario. She also represented the society at the annual meetings of the Ontario Historical Society (OHS). From 1901 to 1911, she sat on the monuments committee of the OHS, and from 1914 to 1919, she was that society's vice-president. In addition to her activities with these organizations, Carnochan wrote a historical column in the local paper, the Niagara Times. Her History of Niagara, printed by William Briggs in Toronto, appeared in 1914, with a foreword by Arthur Hugh Urquhart Colquhoun, deputy minister of education for Ontario, who praised it as "an example of elaborate and untiring investigation." Carnochan also expended much energy in attempts to preserve historical landmarks in Niagara, such as Butler's Burying Ground, forts George and Mississauga, and the military reserve, or commons.
Friend:
Anne Helena Woodruff
Anne Helena Woodruff was a Canadian children's author. While living on her father's farm, she was active with the First Presbyterian Church of St. Davids, where she was organist and the secretary of the Women's Missionary Auxiliary. In 1891, she went to Chicago to live with her married sister Ella, with whom she later moved to Muskegon, Michigan, and eventually back to Niagara Falls. While residing in the United States she published three children's books, all set in St. David's: Betty and Bob (1903), The pond in the marshy meadow (1906), and Three boys and a girl (1906).
