NB: Names marked with an asterisk* have their own entries.
SCOPE OF THIS PROJECT :
This corpus of biographical information is restricted to female authors of a book or pamphlet of fiction or poetry (associated with Canada and issued before 1940) about whom some biographical information could be discovered. Many of the women included in this database also published in genres other than fiction or poetry, and these works are noted as well. However, Canadian women who produced only drama or non-fiction have not been included. In addition to the more than 470 authors who appear, there are scores of additional individuals whose presence in the historical record seems to be restricted to a bibliographical citation. With the current expansion of electronic resources for the pursuit of genealogical and biographical data, more information may be forthcoming about additional authors.
BOOK TITLES
All titles that appear under Book Titles have been verified in the sources cited as Bibliographical References. Titles associated with the writer that have not been confirmed in a reliable resource are categorized as Unverified Titles; many of these may have appeared only in periodicals, without ever receiving monographic publication. The standard bibliographical resource has been the second edition of R. E. Watters' Checklist of Canadian Literature 1628-1960 ... (1972), supplemented by Amicus, the electronic catalogue accessible through the National Library of Canada. Other resources are cited as relevant.
SELECTED PUBLISHED BIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES
Listings in this field have been restricted to the most recent entries in definitive sources such as the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography
or the
Dictionary of Literary Biography
for those authors of sufficient stature to merit inclusion. Published biographies of authors, or of family members, are also cited. References to early biographical dictionaries have been limited to one or two representative citations. Responses to questionnaires on obscure Canadian authors, gathered by the Canadian Library Association in the 1940s, yielded much valuable information. Other biographical information came from a wide array of librarians, archivists, and family members, and from assiduous probing into census data, directories, local histories and the like by project researchers.
ARCHIVAL SOURCES
All citations in this field have been verified.