NOTES:
I have used the spelling St. John for the city now known as Saint John, New Brunswick. The former is how the name was usually spelled during the time period of the novel.
Mount Allison University has had many different names between 1843 and the present, related to a male academy, female academy, commercial college and the university. I’ve endeavoured to use names appropriate to the years mentioned.
The regatta held in the novel is based on an account of the Jubilee Regatta held on June 20, 1887, in Saint John, in celebration of the Jubilee of her Majesty, Queen Victoria. I do not name it as such in the novel, however, since the events of the novel and the actual event do not coincide.
Some readers may be aware of a terrible murder that occurred at the time of this novel in the vicinity of Saint John, and for which a man was hanged. Mr. Tuck’s story bears some resemblance, but is not intended to depict the true and tragic events. The articles read by Ellen in The Sister’s Tale are adapted from the real accounts of this murder, known as the Little River Tragedy, as reported in The Daily Telegraph, Saint John, New Brunswick, 1878.
The town of Pleasant Valley is loosely based on the town of Sussex, New Brunswick, just as Whelan’s Cove is based on present-day St. Martins. Tyne Cove and Black Creek are entirely fictional. All the characters of The Sister’s Tale, except for George Francis Train and a handful of well-known political and historical figures, are products of my imagination.
The philanthropist Maria Rye (1829–1903) is real, although the part she plays in this novel is invented, including her letter to Mr. Fairweather.
George Francis Train (1829–1904) was a highly eccentric Bostonian who did, in fact, stun the town of Sussex in 1887, when he secured a position at the local paper. After denouncing the pauper auction, he was dismissed and sent packing. Every detail about him, as mentioned by narrator or characters, is true. Including the purple gloves.
The Commodore (the name is my invention) is based on an eccentric bachelor of the period, Dr. Goodfellow, a dentist who wore a paisley shawl around his shoulders when he went for walks “with the ends drooping to the ground,” as described by Grace Aiton in The Story of Sussex and Vicinity.
Sussex had its first telephone exchange and operator in 1891. I took the liberty of changing the date to a few years earlier.
TRUE THINGS:
1889: The last pauper auction was held in Sussex, New Brunswick. The Kings County Almshouse and Poor Farm was established in the Parish of Norton, New Brunswick.
1895: An Act Respecting the Property of Married Women showed a dramatic transformation in New Brunswick women’s legal rights, including “Married women may hold real and personal property” and have “full control of property, possessed at time of marriage or acquired after.”
1917: I took the liberty of changing the date of the second reading to the women’s enfranchisement bill. The actual mobbing of a member of the legislative assembly occurred in June 1917, when a private member’s bill calling for women’s enfranchisement went into second reading. After being roundly expected to pass, it was voted down.
1919: Women gained the right to vote in provincial elections in New Brunswick.
1920: The Dominion Elections Act was amended so that every “eligible” Canadian over the age of twenty-one, male or female, could vote in federal elections.
1929: Women became “persons.” On October 18, 1929, the word “person” in Section 24 of the British North America Act was finally understood to mean men and women, in a ruling overturning the Supreme Court of Canada by Canada’s then highest court, the Privy Council in England. Lord Sankey announced: “The exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours.”
1934: A bill passed, allowing women to hold provincial office in New Brunswick.
1939: The Child Migration program was ended in England.
1967: The first female member, Brenda Robertson, was elected to the New Brunswick legislature.
2010: British prime minister Gordon Brown apologized to Home Children: “We are sorry that instead of caring for them, this country turned its back. And we’re sorry that the voices of these children were not always heard, their cries for help not always heeded.”
REFERENCE MATERIAL:
For those interested in learning more about Home Children and women’s lives in the late 1800s, here are some of the books I am indebted to:
Re Home Children:
Sean Arthur Joyce, Laying the Children’s Ghosts to Rest: Canada’s Home Children in the West (Hagios Press, 2014); Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980); Phyllis Harrison, ed., The Home Children (Watson and Dwyer, 1979); Kenneth Bagnell, The Little Immigrants: The Orphans Who Came to Canada (The Dundurn Group, 2001); Marjorie Kohli, The Golden Bridge: Young Immigrants to Canada, 1833–1939 (Natural Heritage Books, 2003).
Re paupers and small town life:
Grace Aiton, The Story of Sussex and Vicinity (Kings County Historical Society, 1967, ’71, ’79); Elaine Ingalls Hogg, Historic Sussex (Nimbus Publishing, 2010); K. Wayne Vail, Yesteryear Sussex.
Re women and suffrage:
Gail G. Campbell, I Wish to Keep a Record: Nineteenth-Century New Brunswick Women Diarists and Their World (University of Toronto Press, 2017); Janet Guildford and Suzanne Morton, eds., Separate Spheres: Women’s Work in the 19th-Century Maritimes (Acadiensis Press, 1994); Mary Hallett and Marilyn Davis, Firing the Heather: The Life and Times of Nellie McClung (Fifth House Publishers, 1993); Constance Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Women’s Press, 1991).
Online and archival materials:
I used too many archival and online sources to list, but here are some of the most valuable: Shannon M. Riske’s dissertation (University of Maine) “In Order to Establish Justice”: The Nineteenth Century Woman Suffrage Movements of Maine and New Brunswick; Elspeth Tulloch’s “We, the Undersigned”: A Historical Overview of N B Women’s Political and Legal Status 1784–1984; and The Report of the Royal Commission on the Relationship of Capital and Labor [sic] in Canada (NB, 1889).