Winona, or The Foster-Sisters

by Isabella Valancy Crawford

The prize-winning entry in a national competition for distinctively Canadian fiction, Winona was serialized in a Montreal story paper in 1873. The novel focuses on the lives of two foster-sisters raised in the northern Ontario Androsia Howard, daughter of a retired military officer, and Winona, the daughter of a Huron chief. As the story begins, both have come under the sway of the mysterious and powerful Andrew Farmer, who has proposed to Androsia while secretly pursuing Winona. With the arrival of Archie Frazer, the son of an old military friend, there is a violent crisis, and the scene shifts southward as Archie takes the foster-sisters via Toronto to his family’s estate in the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River. Farmer follows, and the narrative moves towards a sensational climax. The critical introduction and appendices to this edition place Winona in the contexts of Crawford’s career, the contemporary market for serialized fiction, the sensation novel of the 1860s, nineteenth-century representations of women and North American indigenous peoples, and the emergence of Canadian literary nationalism in the era following Confederation.

Genres: Fiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2006

Reviews

[Vina Barrera☆ · Rating 2 out of 5]

a complete slog. at the end i skimmed maybe 40 pages i just couldn’t do it; it pained my brain

[Matthew White Ellis · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is garbage. This is baaaaad bad writing. The prose, even for its time, is incredibly purple. Paragraph after paragraph of pablum descriptions riddle this text. The descriptions are so full of excessive adjectives and sprawling sentences that the actual scene Crawford is trying to describe is lost to me. She actually washes out whatever it is she is trying to describe with language. This use of super flowery prose makes for an incredibly frustrating reading experience.

To be fair, she could be using this flowery prose as a desperate attempt to elevate her writing. The novel was written as a serial for a newspaper after Crawford won a contest. The novel is thus commissioned in such a way that I could almost understand Crawford’s insecurities towards her own text; she is publishing prose for the first time for a very wide audience, a publication meant to promote the development of an entire nation’s literature. That pressure is ultimately disastrous. I can almost imagine Crawford gathering all her superfluous descriptions of Canadian landscapes in order to validate her piece, while the plotting of this novel is about as thin as the ice one of the sisters falls through (which one? Who knows because the author doesn’t clearly define their relationships to one another and with few exceptions the characters all just blur together). The lengthy descriptions do not so much add to the value of the text, as they distract from not only the thing she is trying to describe, but also the plot and characters.

Speaking of plot, by the time you reach the end of the novel you can see Crawford scrambling to pick up the pieces of her poorly plotted story. The final two chapters read comically as the narrator interrupts the action of the chapter in order to explain some detail which should have been brought in to the story. In fact, the ENDS on one of these digressions. On top of that, you have a novel that seems like it’s not sure what it really wants to be. Crawford doesn’t seem to know whether she wants to write some brutal, violent horror revolving around violence to Indigenous people or an Austenian romance without Lady Jane’s iconic satire and sense of humour. The book is figuratively schizophrenic as it feels as if at least two novels have been shoved into one.

Overall, Winona was a painfully frustrating reading experience. If I didn’t have to read this for a class I would have DNF the thing after the first few chapters. Unfortunately, this aesthetically unpleasing work is considered important in the production of early Canadian Literature. I would hope for anyone who reads this novel out of choice (why would you?) or for a class, that they don’t come away with the impression that Canadian Literature has not evolved since Crawford’s time.

[Olivia Brisebois · Rating 1 out of 5]

This Canadian novel certainly is Canadian and that's about all its got going. It was very boring, things kept happening that were really confusing, and I know due to the appendices that the way it was originally published was very messy. However, the reworking of it seems to keep this sort of confusing narrative going. All and all, not that great of a read.

[Dessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

#classwork

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting tale. A different kind of FMNI and settler story from what I have read before. It is different and I liked that.