The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

qui s'en tirent le mieux, y compris sur le
plan stylistique. Leurs coéquipiers font
pourtant preuve d'assez de courage, d'esprit
d'invention et d'habileté pour bien
mériter la mention honorable et laisser
bien augurer de la suite.
Canadian Experience?
John Richardson
The Canadian Brothers or The Prophecy Fulfilled,
A Tale of the Late American War, Donald
Stephens, ed. Centre for Editing Early Canadian
Texts Series; 9. Oxford $12.95 pa-
Reviewed by Mary Lu MacDonald
The Canadian Brothers is the ninth in the
Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts'
series of meticulously researched and
edited volumes of pre-Confederation literature
in English. No manuscript of the novel
has survived, and only one edition
appeared in Richardson's lifetime; as a
result, the choice of a copy-text presented
no difficulty. This text was then compared
with the chapters published in advance in
the Literary Garland and with the later
"American" version entitled Matilda
Montgomerie. In addition eight extant
copies of the 1840 Montreal publication
were computer-compared, revealing a total
of eleven differences between them. The
scholarly apparatus resulting from this
research is detailed and complete. The
Explanatory Notes which follow the text are
not intrusive and, in the main, provide useful
supplementary information, although
they sometimes raise more questions than
they answer. Either in the Notes or in the
Introduction more information on the War
of 1812 context, beyond that necessary to
explain Richardson's specific references,
would have been helpful.
Since the purpose of the CEECT project
is to provide an authoritative text in a form
inexpensive enough to be used in university
classrooms, the Editor's Introduction is
crucial. It will go into the hands of students,
carrying with it the aura of being the
final word on the subject. John Richardson
presents a particularly difficult problem for
an editor attempting to provide a biographical
summary before entering on a
critical introduction, since the documented
evidence about Richardson's life is
sparse,—we do not even know for sure
where he was born, or what was the cause
of his death. The result of this paucity of
biographical detail has been that many critics
tend to read autobiographical references
into his fiction, picking and choosing at
will from all the possible scenarios provided
by the novels. As editor, Stephens' point-ofview
is clearly stated in a Preface which
relates his own emotional connection with
the work, as well as in the first paragraph of
the Introduction: "It [ The Canadian Brothers]
was also, and more importantly, a fictionalized
chronicle of actual events, people, and
places from Richardson's childhood and
adolescence that both revealed the psychology
of the author and helped create seminal
mythologies about his country." Stephens is
therefore firmly in the school of those who
see autobiography in Richardson's fiction.
With Richardson, who was capable, in selfjustification
and self-dramatization, of fictionalizing
parts of his own autobiographical
works, this can be a dangerous attitude for
the editor of a text intended to be definitive.
The lack of biographical documentation
also allows controversy to arise, as in
the case of Richardson's supposedly Indian
maternal grandmother. The existence of
this person is taken as fact by most critics,
although Douglas Daymond and Leslie
Monkman in their Introduction to the
Canadian Poetry Press edition of Tecumseh
point out that there is no real evidence to
support this claim, which was certainly not
made in Richardson's lifetime, and that
much of the supposed "evidence" is contradictory.
Stephens accepts the story of the
Indian grandmother without question and