SOURCE: "Sisters Under the Mink: The Correspondent Fear in The History of Emily Montague," in Essays on Canadian Writing, Vols. 51-52, Winter 1993-Spring 1994, pp. 340-57.

In the following essay, McCarthy characterizes The History of Emily Montague as an essentially racist and bigoted narrative with a pro-colonialist point of view.

According to Frances Brooke's biographer, Lorraine McMullen, The History of Emily Montague (1769) was "required reading for early British travellers to Canada" (115), and the novel's most recent editor, Mary Jane Edwards, writes that it served as "a kind of guidebook" for tourists and emigrants (Introduction li). But what sort of "guidebook" is Brooke's novel two centuries later, and should it still be "required reading"? I think so, but not for the reasons offered by the historical, thematic, formalist, and, most recently, feminist critics who have kept it, in Carl F. Klinck's words, "long… in the canon of Canadian literature" (v...