SOURCE: Burns, Robert Alan. “The Poet in Her Time: Isabella Valancy Crawford's Social, Economic, and Political Views.” Studies in Canadian Literature 14, no. 1 (1989): 30-53.

In the following essay, Burns discusses the impact that Crawford's gender had on her writing, her reaction to events and social norms of the day, and analyzes related poems.

After a lifetime of solitary effort to achieve recognition as a poet, Isabella Valancy Crawford felt understandable disappointment and bitterness toward the male-dominated editorship of literary periodicals in Canada. She expressed these emotions in a letter to Arcturus, a newly established literary journal, which published the letter on the 19th of February 1887, a few days after her death:

… no contribution of mine has ever been accepted by any first-class Canadian literary journal. I have contributed to the Mail and Globe, and won some very kind words from eminent critics, but have been quietly “sat upon” by...