The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor

Sally Armstrong’s novel about her great-great-great grandmother came my way just as I was questioning whether I might write a book about my own ancestor. The author faced all the same problems. Should it be fiction or non-fiction or a blend? Because her relative was an 18^th century pioneer and not a public figure, archival documentation was spotty. How would she fill the gaps?

Based on her research and family stories from many descendants, Armstrong believed she knew certain things about her subject. Charlotte Howe Taylor ran away from her aristocratic English family in 1775 in the company of her lover, who may have been a black man. Her lover died soon after they crossed the Atlantic on a sailing ship and she settled on the Miramichi River in what is now New Brunswick. There she survived three husbands and raised 10 children in extremely difficult pioneer circumstances, facing harsh winters, raids by American revolutionaries and their First Nations allies, a massive forest fire and primitive medical care. Charlotte earned a reputation as a fiercely independent, flinty homesteader who fought for title to the land she and her husbands had cleared and worked. Stories of a liaison with a Mi’kmaq man and a 200-km trek by snowshoe to Fredericton to transfer her lot licence to a proper deed under the new province made her all the more intriguing. And unlike her many husbands, Charlotte lived a long life – to age 86.

Despite Armstrong’s many years as a journalist covering women in war zones, the author chose fiction for her narrative – and happily not a romanticized account. The Charlotte she brings to life is gritty, practical and outspoken. The young settler takes on each new husband with surprisingly little reflection and with an expediency that recognizes the difficulties of widowhood on the frontier. And we learn, along with her, how to survive in those circumstances: how spruce, not pine, boughs are best for bedding, how to boil meat using fire-heated rocks in water, and how husbands who die mid-winter can be buried in a snow bank until spring. Many of these skills she learned from the Mi’kmaq.

This is a story of land and the labour required to clear and keep it. As Loyalists move into the territory with land grants, pre-Loyalists like Charlotte have a fight on their hands. Meanwhile returning Acadians and Mi’kmaq assert their own property rights. And because Charlotte’s early months in the region were spent in a Mi’kmaq and Acadian camp, she is sensitive to their interests. As historian Charlotte Gray pointed out in a review of Armstrong’s novel, this openness wasn’t unusual among early Canadian pioneer women, and settlers like Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill accepted that “Indigenous Peoples’ world view might have as much validity as their own.”

A delicate thread of longing pulls the narrative forward as Charlotte tends her growing family with no word from her family in England. The puzzle of why Charlotte Taylor turned her back on that life becomes clearer toward the end of this engaging book, as we share her delight in creating a life from scratch.

Ann Walmsley’s memoir, The Prison Book Club (2015 Viking, Penguin Canada), is her first book and was longlisted for the 2016 RBC Taylor Prize, the 2016 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and named as a best book of 2015 by the National Post and Book City. It is also published in the UK and Commonwealth by Oneworld Publications. Shanghai Joint Publishing Co., Ltd. will publish a forthcoming edition in translation in China, and Kinokuniya Co., Ltd. will produce a Japanese edition.

Ann is a magazine journalist whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail Report on Business Magazine, Maclean’s and many other publications.

She is the recipient of four National Magazine Awards, a Canadian Business Journalism Award and two International Regional Magazine Awards. Her most recent literary dispatch was for English Pen and can be read on her website: www.annwalmsley.com.

Ann founded her first book club at age nine. She lives in Toronto.

Sally Armstrong is an Amnesty International Media Award winner, a member of the Order of Canada, older of eight honourary degrees, a teacher, journalist, human rights activist, and contributor to aclean’s, Chatelaine and the CBC.

She is a member of the International Women’s Commission, a UN body that consists of 20 Palestinian women, 20 Israeli women and 12 internationals whose mandate is assisting with the path to peace in the Middle East. A bestselling author of

Her latest book is Ascent of Women: a New Age is Dawning For Every Mother’s Daughter.