C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

IntroductionXXXIXalso offered adventure in the wilderness, with crocodile hunting, fishing, andher family's roots in the colonial past:.,. many a time when we were children we would persuade my father to repeatto us the tale of his uncle Frank Newbold who was forced to eat his boots afterbeing shipwrecked on the way to Australia and of Uncle Willie Newbold whomet his violent death on the Queensland plain.My mother would never speak of those great-uncles by marriage, she didnot think they adorned the family pedigree but we children all felt it was a finedistinction. (147)Vyvyan's arctic narrative is in part a search for similar stories. She might evenhave envied the life of Frank Foster, a trapper whom she met at Fort Yukon: hisbooks and the solitude he enjoyed at his cabin on the lower Porcupine Riverappealed strongly to her (171). Because her autobiography associates the romanceof the wilderness with male exploits on the fringes of empire, "the freedom to befound in bush life" (153) is directly opposed to her maternal inheritance ofstifling domesticity and social relations. In Edmonton in 1926, she and DorrienSmith grew irritated with the confines of civilization and were eager to be free ofit. As late as the writing of her auto biography, she presented travel as an escapefrom the still-pervasive post -Victorian constraints on single women of uppermiddle-classEngland: "to rest awhile in open country or secret valleys, out ofsight of any human dwelling, would always give me an almost religious sense ofcontentment" (Roots 58). It is understandable, then, that she found herself underRobert Service's spell of the Yukon and that her book opens with her acknowledgementof his poetry as the catalyst for her northern travels.Why did Vyvyan wait until 1961 to publish a book about this trip? In 1926, shehad been in the first wave of professional travel writers going "north of sixty" intoterritories containing two-fifths of all Canada's land. As many have pointed out,the tradition of arctic exploration had, by the end of the nineteenth century,established the northern sublime as "a masculine realm of arduous adventure"(Lawrence 76 n4). Traditionally represented by the literatures of scientificexploration and frontier adventure, the North was, literarily speaking, newterritory for women. Surely, then, the writer in Vyvyan saw the value of strikingwhile the novelty of the moment was hot. Yet, although she published articles,