A Life of Propriety: Anne Murray Powell and Her Family, 1755-1849

Anne Murray Powell was born to a middle-class English family in 1755. She was neither famous nor unusually talented but her story embodies the values of her time, place, and class. Having emigrated to Boston at 16, in 1775 she married and returned to England during her husband’s training as a lawyer. They eventually settled in British North America, residing chiefly in York (Toronto). Anne, as well as being the mother of 9 children, was a leading figure in York’s social circles - a member of a generation that matured during a period of dramatic social change. Katherine McKenna’s biography, based on an extensive collection of letters and papers, shows how the three distinct environments in which she and her family lived - England, New England, and Upper Canada - were shaped by important aspects of late 18th-century and early Victorian society. During this period the realms of the public and the private became increasingly separated, with increasingly separate roles for men and women. Changes in cultural values concerning gender, ideals about family relationships, and ideas of the appropriate role of women brought uncertainty, confusion, and contradiction. Anne Powell’s life embodied this shift in values and provides an example of how they were carried from the old world to the new. A life of Propriety contributes to the literature on women in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, and should also be of interest to scholars in women’s studies, and early Ontario and Canadian history, as well as to the general reader.