Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [166]
Catharine’s struggles to find a publisher were particularly exasperating since she was now clearly a bone fide Canadian celebrity herself, rather than simply the sister of either Agnes Strickland or Susanna Moodie. Successive governors-general paid obeisance to her. Six years after being lionized in Ottawa by the Lansdownes, Catharine was invited to preside over the hospitality offered to Lansdowne’s successor, Baron Stanley of Preston, and his wife Lady Stanley when they made a two-hour visit to Lakefield in September 1890. The village residents threw themselves into the viceregal reception. They built arches over the main street, decorated the village hall in flowers and wreaths, draped clean white linen cloths over the rugged trestle tables and appointed twelve girls to wait upon the tables at tea. Catharine was not impressed. Her discomfort with snobbery and formality erupted. “I had a bad headache and felt unequal to the fatigue,” she wrote to her son William. She smiled graciously throughout the Governor-General’s generous compliments to her—“a lady whose name is known … in England as well as here”—although her advanced deafness and the clatter of teaspoons meant she couldn’t hear a word. However, a lifetime of authorship meant that Catharine knew how to take advantage of such a situation: she was more than happy to present Lady Stanley with a copy of Studies of Plant Life in Canada. For all the excitement, as soon as the Stanleys had been escorted off to a night train “amid huzzahs and a torchlight procession and God Save the Queen by a Lindsay band,” Catharine was relieved to get back to Westove.
Once again, it was not the important men with fancy titles amongst Catharine’s acquaintance who came to her rescue on the publishing front but her own family. Soon after the Stanleys’ visit to Lakefield, Maime Fitzgibbon came to live there. “I shall be busy writing,” Catharine told William, “as she wants us to bring out a volume together.” Maime had become friendly with Edward Caswell, the eager young literary editor at the Toronto-based Methodist Book and Publishing House. Caswell was working with Maime on her second book, a biography of her maternal grandfather entitled A Veteran of 1812: The Life of James FitzGibbon, which was eventually published in 1894. Both Maime and Edward were caught up in the craze for “wheeling,” or bicycling, that swept Toronto in the 1890s. Maime was just the kind of woman to embrace the liberation that the bicycle offered. Still single at forty and an intrepid traveller who had gone west by train and crossed the Atlantic by steamer, she loved to swathe her head in a veil, her legs in bloomers, and go for a good wheel. Mr. Caswell pedalled as fast as he could to keep up with her as she sped around the streets of Toronto, or along the Don Valley ravine. One August, she persuaded him to put his bicycle on the train to Peterborough, and to cycle from there to Lakefield to visit Catharine Parr Traill at Westove.
Edward was captivated by the genial, white-haired author, now in her nineties, who sat on the verandah and seemed to recognize each individual bird that flew through her garden. Maime soon had him interested in her