Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter (Carleton Library Series, 265) (Volume 265) - Softcover

Salverson, Laura

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0228018331 ISBN 13: 9780228018339

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023

Synopsis

Born in Winnipeg to Icelandic immigrants in 1890, Laura Goodman Salverson embarked on a life marked by contradiction and cultural exchange. Her 1939 memoir braids the strands of her parents’ intellectual life in Iceland with a hardscrabble existence on the Prairies at the turn of the century, all against a backdrop of European settlement in post-Riel Manitoba and in colourful, self-assured prose.

Leaving behind economic hardship, a difficult climate, and the threat of volcanoes, Lars Gudman was in search of stability for his family, but he was also ensnared by wanderlust. Travelling onward to Minnesota, the Dakotas, Selkirk, Duluth, and the Mississippi Valley, Salverson and her parents returned time and again to the Icelandic enclave in Winnipeg, a community struggling to adjust to life in Canada. In Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter Salverson makes real the political and cultural history of the twentieth-century North American west, even as she draws the reader into the inner life of a young girl growing up “hopelessly Icelandic” and finding refuge from discrimination and ostracism in the world of books.

With a new introduction by Carl Watts situating the memoir and its prolific author in the literary canon, and reproducing Salverson’s original preface for the first time, Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter remains both a Canadian classic and an important social history of the experiences of women and immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Authors

Laura Goodman Salverson (1890–1970) was an award-winning Canadian author.

Carl Watts teaches at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

From the Back Cover

The Carleton Library Series is an enduring and significant initiative to publish and reissue documents and texts important to the history of the place we now call Canada. Begun in the 1950s at Carleton University, the series was intended to be a non-fiction counterpart to the New Canadian Library. In the new millennium the motivations for, and thus the mandate of, the series have shifted. While the CLS remains committed to humanities and social science research on the long histories of the territory called Canada, it now takes as its primary purpose the reimaging of how Canada understands itself. The series does not seek to define what Canada should be but rather invites scholars working on questions about the country's history, present, and future to reassess persistent mythologies and to imagine just shared futures. The CLS publishes books that engage in the transformative diversification of knowledge; that examine local and regional knowledges and experiences; that explore the relation of Canada to the world within and across borders; and that draw on a range of disciplines, theoretical traditions, methodologies, and epistemologies.

The CLS publishes original manuscripts and reissues out-of-print materials that are accompanied by new scholarly introductions and other editorial apparatuses. Manuscript proposals may be sent to the editorial board chair, Jody Mason, at jody.mason@carleton.ca or to any member of the editorial board.

CLS board members: Martha Attridge Bufton, Vandna Bhatia, Sheryl Hamilton, Jennifer Henderson, Laura Madokoro, Jody Mason, Pat Moore

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0228018331
• ISBN 13: 9780228018339
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 392