New Book Links Scottish, Canadian Literature

By Barbara Chance

A lifelong love of literature with a Scottish accent has led to two new books by University professor emerita Elizabeth Waterston of the School of Literatures and Performance Studies in English.

Waterston's newest works - including her first-ever venture into fiction - have their roots in her childhood, when she first became enamoured of the writings of such Scottish authors as J.M. Barrie and Sir Walter Scott. As she went on to study Victorian literature at Bryn Mawr and the University of Toronto, her interest in Scottish writing grew, but it intensified even more when she joined the faculty of U of G in 1965. Here, she found herself ensconced in a city founded by Scottish novelist John Galt and at a university that was to become world renowned for its academic and archival offerings in the study of Scottish history and culture.

Although Waterston's specialty at Guelph was Canadian literature and she never had an opportunity to teach in the Scottish studies program, her love of Scottish writing and her research interest in the genre have never waned. And the result is the book Rapt in Plaid: Canadian Literature and Scottish Tradition, published this spring by University of Toronto Press.

The book combines reflection, criticism and memoir to illustrate a long-lasting connection between Scottish and Canadian literary traditions. Waterston links the works of Canadian writers such as Alice Munro, Hugh MacLennan, Margaret Laurence and W.O. Mitchell to Scottish writers such as Scott, Barrie, Robert Burns, Thomas Carlyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. She draws examples from lyric poetry, narrative romance, war fiction, children's literature, sentimental fiction, thrillers, domestic novels and short stories.

Rapt in Plaid traces the connections from directly imitative 19th-century Canadian writers to modern Canadian works where Scottish tradition persists, sometimes transformed and sometimes distorted. The book illustrates how Scottish ideas and values still wield power in Canadian politics, education, theology, economics and social mores, Waterston says.

More than anything, what she'd like readers to take away from Rapt in Plaid is how much joy there is in reading - and re-reading - books. "Some critics might call me sentimental in my assessments of the works described throughout Rapt in Plaid, but I think 'affectionate' is a better way to describe my approach. I like books - why should I slash them?"

It was while doing the research for Rapt in Plaid that Waterston was inspired to write her first work of historical fiction, Plaid Around the Mountain. Just published by Borealis Press, it's the story of a young Englishwoman in the early 1800s who takes a trip to Scotland and ends up marrying a Scot who's on his way to Canada to work as an agent for Lord Selkirk. Their story in Canada is set in and around Montreal and focuses in large part on the rivalry among the fur-trading companies.

Although fiction, the book is historically accurate and includes well-known figures of the time, says Waterston, who is currently at work on two more novels.

"Writing Plaid Around the Mountain was great fun," she says. "I never knew from one day to the next what would happen to my characters. Margaret Laurence once told me that that's what happens when you write fiction, but I didn't believe her."

Waterston's new works bring to 12 the number of books she has published - eight on her own and four as co-author. She is well known in recent years for her collaboration with Guelph English professor Mary Rubio on the L.M. Montgomery journals. The fifth and final volume in that series, covering the years leading up to Montgomery's death, will appear sometime in 2002.