Jean O'Grady

A collection of quotations from Canada’s greatest literary theorist. "There is no Canadian writer of whom we can say … that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference." Northrop Frye came to that conclusion after a detailed study of the imaginative achievements of Canada’s writers from the earliest period to 1965, when that sentence from his study first appeared in print. Over the decades since then, the statement has come to be regarded as a benchmark of individual and national literary achievement. The Northrop Frye Quote Book is a specialized dictionary of quotations on all subjects that is based on the thoughts and writings of one person. It is the handiwork of a single contributor, albeit the cogitations of a remarkable one. It is also evidence that there is a Canadian writer of whom it may be said that we can grow up inside his work "without ever being aware of a circumference." John Robert Colombo has written, translated, edited, or compiled over two hundred books, including seven dictionaries of quotations. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Frye Centre at Victoria University. Jean O’Grady, a graduate of the University of Toronto, served as the associate editor of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. She is also the author of the biography of Margaret Addison, the first dean of women at Victoria College.

O'Grady presents Addison in several different lights: as a woman learning to assert herself in the hitherto male world of university governance; as an administrator dealing with questions of individual freedom and group standards at a time when the permissible limits of behaviour were expanding; as a former Methodist who learned to modify her beliefs while retaining her core Christianity; and as an advocate for more fulfiling lives for women who was forced to deal with questions of co-education, the possibility of gender-neutral studies, and the nature of womanliness. O'Grady clearly shows that Addison wanted to make a difference in the world and did so B her innovations, such as student government and lectures on careers and sex education, were widely copied in other universities. Drawing on archival material and writing in an accessible style, O'Grady captures the flavour of life in Annesley Hall under Addison's regime and uncovers part of the buried mosaic of the lives of Canadian women.

Drawing on the diary Margaret Addison kept while travelling in Europe, Jean O'Grady makes available the experiences of the woman who would become the first dean of Annesley Hall at Victoria College. Addison spent most of 1900 travelling through Europe and Britain. Her reactions to various exhibitions and museums in London and Paris are vividly recorded, as are her experiences with British and European society. She describes her encounters with "old world" culture and history and reflects on its meaning for Canada. Her trip ended with visits to the local women's colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, visits that were important to her understanding of how the British experience could be adapted to benefit the women who would live in Annesley Hall, for which Victoria College was then raising funds. This never-before published diary, edited and annotated by Jean O'Grady, offers a remarkable insight into the cultural milieu of the women who shaped higher education in Canada. It will be invaluable for anyone interested in Canadian culture and the history of education, and offers an ideal of "womanliness" that is of interest to feminist theorists.