“Spenser, Ariosto etc.”: Elizabeth Simcoe Reads Canada

J. Ross Robertson published the first edition of what he called The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe in 1911. It begins with the writer’s arrival at the Channel town of Weymouth, Dorsetshire, on 17 September 1791, from where she will embark for British North America. It concludes after her return to England, with her putting up in a Cork Street, London, hotel on 16 October 1796. Mary Quayle Innis’s 1965 Mrs. Simcoe’s Diary, a fresh transcription of the manuscript, observes the same termini. Both editors provide notes, but Ross and Innis alike refrain from going beyond bare identification of what Simcoe quotes, refers to, or (in the case of plays) sees. Sometimes they direct the reader to Simcoe’s source. Neither editor speculates about the meaning of Elizabeth Simcoe’s allusions or how they might illuminate her education, her sensibility, or her construction of Canadian reality. These omissions bear addressing. A closer engagement with two exemplary passages can reveal some of the ways in which Simcoe “settled” her experience artistically, even as it occurred. She canvasses such topics as history, indigeneity, womanhood and herself as, possibly, a heroine. Elizabeth Simcoe was born in England in 1762, married Colonel John Graves Simcoe in 1782, and accompanied him on the post ship H.M. Triton after he was appointed Lieutenant-Governor to the new Province of Upper Canada created by the Canada Act of 1791. On the twelfth of June 1792, she and her husband passed in a set of bateaux out of Lac St. Pierre, a dilation of the St. Lawrence River. They paused at the town of Sorel before continuing upstream toward Montréal. Simcoe writes in her journal: This passage reflects Elizabeth Simcoe’s wilful hedonism as well as her syncretic imagination. What she wants and what she derives is pleasure. What kind? She reckons her evening “almost” agreeable enough to justify the discomfort of faring overseas. This verdict modifies a passage from Frances Brooke’s 1769 epistolary novel The History of Emily Montague. In that fiction, young Arabella Fermor (a heroine bearing a name Brooke borrowed from the circle of Alexander Pope) reports from Silleri, near Québec City: “the loveliness of this fairy scene alone more than pays the fatigues of my voyage; and, if I ever murmur at having crossed the Atlantic, remind me I have seen the River Montmorenci.” Captain George Murray’s storm-rattled sixth-rater had not offered Brooke’s reader, Elizabeth Simcoe, an easeful transit from Britain to Lower Canada in September and October 1791. The diarist here enjoys an ironic adaptation of Emily Montague to her own case, while testifying to a fresh and, for her, unprecedented delight. She varies her bliss by the act of recreating her experience as literature and through literature, improvising on a motif from Frances Brooke. Lac St. Pierre, where the St. Lawrence River bulges to sixteen kilometres in breadth, stimulates a knowing tribute to an earlier female writer. Brooke’s Arabella Fermor depicts Montmorenci with François Boucher-like sensuality. She projects multiple presences of her own sex onto the beauty-spot. Comparing the environs to “the abode of the Nereids,” Fermor calls “a little island, crowned with flowering shrubs… the throne of the river goddess,” and declares “I intend to build a temple here to the charming goddess of laziness.” In less stable circumstances, writing offers the itinerant Simcoe delectation to compound her June evenings—analogously as the bateaumen’s song enhances nightfall’s visible (though voiceless) transfigurations. Simcoe’s prior reading of Emily Montague informs the happiness she feels—and makes. Simcoe was a gifted painter. Her familiarity with the picturesque colours her phrasing. Out of a community of aesthetic expectation, other …