Flora Sophia, Anne Shirley, Kate Middleton

A few posts ago I commented on a website that deemed my www.tighsolas.ca website to be worth a booming 11 dollars. This site said so few visitors came to my site that it was not worth noting.

But I riposted that the visitors to my website, (three times what they cited) were mostly high school students, mostly from Canada, most from BC and Ontario, but also College Students, British Students, American students, and some from every province in Canada.

And I also mentioned that they ALMOST ALWAYS find what they are looking for. The list above is random, and except for search term “the meaning of apocalypse” www.tighsolas.ca has the answers to these queries.

The writer, continuity, is ME. I did that once and it is posted on my C.V.

So there you go.

I also notice that more hits from BC for my story Looking for Mrs. Peel on PDF at www.tighsolas.ca/page3.pdf.pdf

That pleases me. My story is about my grandmother’s experiences at Changi, in Singapore, where she was tortured in an infamous incident.

But it’s also about 1967 Canada, and about grandmothers/granddaughters and inter-generational tension.

This is a story that should appeal to all Canadians, but especially for Canadians of Asian origin, Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians too.

Maybe it will become a Canadian bestseller or the best selling e-book on the Net.

It’s a radio play really, (because I love BBC Radio Four radio plays and I was hoping to get it produced, as I once was a radio writer) but a Canadian publisher has asked to see a narrative prose version.

(But first I have to Finish Flo in the City).

Malaya was one of the world’s first multicultural societies – and my story touches upon that too.

Ps. I see that His and Her Royal Highnesses William and Kate are going to visit P.E.I on their Canadian visit because Kate Middleton is a fan of Anne of Green Gables. She’ll like it there. She’s a natural unaffected beauty and PEI has a lot of natural unaffected beauty.

Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908, by a Boston Publisher, and a while I back I thought about figuring a way to put that in my story of Flo in the City, because Flora visited Boston in 1908 and Anne of Avonlea was serialized in the Montreal Gazette in 1910 or 1911. I saw it there in the archives.

Anne of Green Gables

Anne of Green Gables in Cavendish PEI.

Well, 1908 was the year Anne of Green Gables was published. The book was an immediate hit in London, with the London World predicting that the story would take its place with Little Women and Alice in Wonderland.

A Boston Paper claimed that the book would be read, like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, by both children and adults.

One New York Times article reports that the book is in its third printing in the UK (still 1908) but that the story could easily be an American story, except for the mention of Queen’s College.

And the Montreal Gazette had a fine review too (so I will have someone give Flora a copy.)

That article said the book is the fruit of a richly endowed mind and imaginative capacity.

I have to admit, I have never read the book (I sort of went from picture books to adult books.)

I did really like the Meaghan Follows tv adaptaption and still watch it any time I can.

Now, it’s easy to see what captured the hearts of readers, but I wonder what about the story appealed to the 1908 citizen specifically. A smart, feisty girl, with no family surviving and getting ahead on the sheer force of her personality. (Like Elizabeth Bennett, again.). Remember how important ‘connections’ were to the Nicholson girls… and how important the sisters were to each other.

To be alone in the world then was no picnic.

Flora probably loved the book; she was a dreamer and all the Nicholson women were feisty, although Marion was the feistiest.

You know, you read the list of bestsellers in the era and VERY FEW books have survived the century, even if they were very popular back at the time of their publication.

Even Little Women isn’t as popular now as it was when I was a child. (It was one of the first novels I ever read because my mother ordered it from a book club.) I got Little Women and Big Red.

The Elizabeth Taylor movie helped that book remain popular in the mid 20th century.

Anne of Green Gables, supposedly, is or was popular in Japan in the 70′s… was this because Japanese women were experiencing what NA women went through at the turn of the century?

Alice in Wonderland, well, that’s a book of entirely a different order, I think. I mean, it’s just been made into a movie, again.

The Push-Pull of Biology and Ambition

Left: The young men of Eastern Townships, Quebec, circa 1908.

I am writing a book, Flo in the City, based on the real life letters of Flora Nicholson of Richmond, Quebec, posted at www.tighsolas.ca.

The novel will cover the years 1908, when Flora was a naive, over-protected schoolgirl of 15, who froze at examination time, living in a posh neighborhood of a quiet town, to 1913, when she was a teacher, with diploma, working in a city slum with some of the most deprived children in the entire Western World – all about to live through a Great War.

These five years were particularly pivotal when put in historical perspective.

Henry Ford perfected the manufacturing of his Model-T between 1908 and 1913 and D. W. Griffith created his many many silent film shorts in those years.

The automobile and the motion picture show, among other era innovations, changed the way people lived, big time.

(Coincidentally, Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908, by a Boston Publisher.

The iconic novel has since spawned an entire industry and become a key focus of tourism in Canada.

Last September I took my first trip to PEI, or Prince Edward island. I bought an Anne Shirley doll at the Welcome Centre of that picturesque province, and it now sits on my mantle between the two art nouveau vases I inherited from my mother’s family.

These are portrait vases of pretty girls in the Rembrandt style, gold on black with a greenish tinge, so the lovely little souvenir doll, dressed in green with a cap of glistening golden-red hair, fits in quite nicely.)

As it happens, we are experiencing something similar, right now, although, this time, the changes are happening so fast it is quite possible that we are morphing into a completely different animal.

Not that some things about us will stay the same. That’s why it is so important to consult history when making assessments of ‘the present’,

Take dating, or ‘courtship’ – as scholars might call it. (Not a classic ‘history’ topic, but why not?) From what I can see, not much has changed about the way young people ‘feel’ about ‘the art of love’ since 1910.

Marion sounds like a typical young woman in her 1907 diary as she experiences the perplexing push-pull of biology and ambition.

Flora, too, is similarly ambivalent about her desires for the future. At least, this is what I am trying to convey in my opening chapter Just a Change of Colour, which I started to compose in the previous blog, Do I Dare Eat A Peach?

Flora can’t get the phrase “Just a Change of Colour” out of her mind. Why? Because it relates to marriage and love, the biological imperative. And even ambitious ‘new women’ of the 1910 era like Marion and Flora, have sex on the brain.

Flora has more pressing issues to attend to. Indeed, her future career may be hanging in the balance – for she is failing at school, but, alas, Mother Nature cannot be denied.

Why do novels like Pride and Prejudice and Anne of Green Gables endure in the hearts of women while other once popular works fade to black in the collective unconscious? Because they deal with this very dilemma.

One remark I’d like to make about the Nicholsons and dating. From movies and such we are all aware that young women of that era from good families couldn’t consort with men except under the watchful eye of a chaperone.

Well, this doesn’t appear to be the rule with the Nicholsons, even though they came from a very respectable middle class family.

From pictures I have in the Tighsolas 1900 photo album, the girls were afforded quite a lot of freedom when dating. Richmond was such a close knit community, it is unlikely young people could get away with much, even if unchaperoned.

Still, it seems to me, if a young man had ‘serious’ designs on a young woman, he showed it by walking her to church. I guess, in this way, her entire family, the entire community, could see what was happening.

The photo above is one of many ‘goofy’ ones featuring young men.
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