A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada: The Journals, Letters and Art of Anne Langton

Anne Langton (1804-1893) arrived in Upper Canada in 1837 to join her brother John on his settler farm near Fenelon Falls, Ontario. An accomplished miniaturist, landscape artist, and writer, Langton documented ten years of family and community hardship and growth in her journals, letters, and art, and traced her own physical and psychological transformation from cultivated Englishwoman to hard-working pioneer settler. She became an exceptionally influential member of the community, developing the first school and library in the area, ministering to the sick, undertaking charitable work, and hosting community events, all the while continuing to record her reactions to her new world in her writing and artwork.

First published in 1950, A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada is a classic work of early pioneering literature. This new, significantly expanded edition includes many of Langton’s original illustrations and reveals Langton’s views on writing, art, and women’s social and familial roles in nineteenth-century Europe and Canada. In her extensive introduction, Barbara Williams contextualizes Langton’s life and work and reflects on them in light of current scholarship in life writing, art history, and early emigrant, cultural, and social history. This is the definitive edition of Anne Langton’s important text.