Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald Biography

An active and congenial member of the Canadian literary community for more than fifty years, Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald was best known for her journalism and poetry which appeared in many Canadian and American newspapers and periodicals. Professionally and in private life she associated and corresponded with some of the leading literary figures of the 1890s, including Wilfred Campbell, Edward William Thomson and Duncan Campbell Scott; today her name is scarcely remembered, and her only work to have been recently republished is, ironically, the one she least wanted to preserve.

Raised as a member of the Society of Friends, Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald was born in Rockwood, Ontario, the sixth of the eleven children of William Wetherald and Jemima Harris Balls Wetherald. When she was seven her father, founder and principal of Rockwood Academy, became superintendent of Haverford College, near Philadelphia; a few years later the family moved to a fruit and dairy farm at Chantler, near Fenwick, on the Niagara Peninsula. This was to be the poet's home for most of her life, the farm being run by some of her nine brothers after her father became a Quaker minister. Wetherald was educated at the Friends Boarding School at Union Springs, New York, and at Pickering College in Ontario. She sold her first poem when she was seventeen to St. Nicholas Magazine and published a series of stories in Rose-Belford's Canadian Monthly from 1880 to 1882. But she did not write seriously until 1886, when she began to contribute essays and sketches to the Toronto Globe under the pseudonym Bel Thistlethwaite, the maiden name of her paternal grandmother. During the next three years she also contributed poetry and prose to the Week, including a series of articles on Canadian literary women, and collaborated with Graeme Mercer Adam on her only piece of extended fiction, An Algonquin Maiden: A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada (1886).

At Wetherald's request, no mention of this book appeared in John W. Garvin's introduction to her collection Lyrics and Sonnets (1931). The embarrassing qualities of this historical romance (which was republished by the University of Toronto Press in 1973) were aptly summarized by two of Wetherald's contemporaries, Sara Jeannette Duncan, who commented rather acidly in the Week on the style of Wetherald's "aerial writing," and Pauline Johnson, who, in "A Strong Race Opinion on the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction" (Toronto Sunday Globe, 22 May 1892), focused on the unreality of Wanda, the unfortunate maiden whose ill-fated love for a white man leads to tragedy.

In the fall of 1889 Wetherald was invited by John Cameron to move to London, Ontario, to write for the London Advertiser and for a new feminist monthly, Wives and Daughters, which ran for three years. During this period of professional journalism she found herself increasingly drawn to poetry, which she began to publish in a wide range of Canadian and American periodicals, including Scribner's, Outlook, the Chap-Book, and the Detroit Free Press. Like many Canadian writers of the 1890s, she contributed to the Youth's Companion (Boston) when Edward William Thomson became its fiction editor. In 1894 she published more poems in the Companion than any other poet; these became the basis of her first book of poetry, The House of the Trees and Other Poems (1895). Her involvement in the American publishing business increased during the winter of 1895-1896, when she worked in Philadelphia as an editorial assistant on the Ladies' Home Journal, and then with Charles Dudley Warner and Forrest Morgan on A Library of the World's Best Literature, for which she may have moved to Hartford, Connecticut. She also lived for several years in St. Paul.

Afraid that employment as a proofreader would "crush out whatever repressed spontaneous growth of my own was still surviving," as she said in "Reminiscences," her foreword to Lyrics and Sonnets, Wetherald returned to Fenwick to work on the farm and her writing. Unmarried, she eventually adopted a little girl, Dorothy, born in 1910. The first years of the twentieth century were her most productive decade, with the publication of three books of poetry. Wetherald's mastery of rhyme and meter is evident in her sonnets and her concise lyrics celebrating love and nature, some of which were written from the tree house where she slept on hot summer nights. The best of her poems are musical, restrained, and precise, and are equal to much of the work of her better-known Canadian contemporaries such as Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. On occasion ("The Humming-Bird," "The World Well Lost") her themes and images recall the poetry of Emily Dickinson, whose "unerring fastidiousness" she praised in Wives and Daughters.

Wetherald's later work does not show developments in form or content. She continued to write about the regenerative powers of nature and the birth and death of love without any apparent temptation to experiment with free verse or unconventional topics. She also produced a volume of children's verse, Tree-Top Mornings (1921), which was written for her adopted daughter, Dorothy. A letter from the late 1920s describing an unidentified period of her life includes a tantalizing reference to "an anonymous novel, for which [E. W. Thomson] found publication." Wetherald named Ralph Waldo Emerson, Matthew Arnold, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as some of her influences; her close Canadian literary acquaintances included Laura Durand, literary editor at the Globe, and the poets Helena Coleman and Marjorie Pickthall, with whom she vacationed in 1911. She responded appreciatively to the poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford and in 1905 wrote an introduction to Crawford's Collected Poems, edited by Garvin, who later edited and introduced her own Lyrics and Sonnets, a gathering of all the verse she wished to preserve. At the end of her life Ethelwyn Wetherald was remembered as much for the warmth and dignity of her personality as for the charm of her poetry, and was praised by her contemporaries as "a genuine and indigenous Canadian Singer."