2 minute read
Historical fiction
At Face Value
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don akenson
“A wonderful postmodern, post-feminist, historically grounded fictional elaboration of cultural depth, political importance and literary delight … [It is] a treasure – not buried, just discovered by too few Canadian readers.” The Globe and Mail
At Face Value spins the tale of John White, a trusty Tory backbencher in Canada’s post-Confederation Parliament who was unusually sympathetic to women and Indigenous communities. Hewing closely to the archival record, it nevertheless diverges on one crucial point, reimagining White as a woman named Eliza McCormack.
In this Canadian take on Moll Flanders, Don Akenson constructs a past in which people felt free to live in the gender of their own choosing, revealing the assumptions with which gender labels are freighted and the self-empowerment available to those who reject them. Following Eliza from her birth in 1832, amid the Irish cholera panic, At Face Value recounts her blacksmithing apprenticeship, a difficult passage to Canada, an unconventional marriage, and the peaks and valleys of her political career. In Eliza, Akenson offers readers a correction to the male-dominated historical record and an unforgettable literary heroine.
Shortlisted for the Trillium Prize when it was released in 1990, this classic Canadian novel has only gained relevance in the thirty years since. At Face Value offers a window into the past and a mirror for the present.
Don Akenson, A.C. Hamilton Distinguished University Professor and Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen’s University, is the author of An Irish History of Civilization, volumes 1 and 2.
The Orangeman
The Life and Times of Ogle Gowan Second Edition
don akenson
“A fascinating book that asks and answers the questions historians often avoid.” The Globe and Mail
From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to Confederation, central Canada was awash with migrants from the British Isles and their cultural values. The raw prejudice that they brought with them – against the French, the Catholics, and even Yanks and Europeans – bound together the eventual political majority in Ontario. The Orangeman uses the life of Ogle Gowan, an Irish Protestant upstart from County Wexford who turned central Canada Orange, to explore these forces.
Gowan was ambitious, malicious, and mendacious, but by the time of Confederation the Orange Order was the largest alliance of men in the country – the foundation of the coalition of conservative Protestants that sculpted Canadian politics in the century that followed. Don Akenson uses his skills as a historian and a novelist in respecting the historical record. The Orangeman is a lively and entertaining fictional biography, and in Akenson’s telling Gowan crosses swords with William Lyon Mackenzie and goes pub-crawling with the young John A. Macdonald.
One never knows everything about a historical person or event; sometimes the right thing to do is to speculate sensibly and, if possible, have a little fun along the way. Akenson shows us Canadian loyalism, constitutionalism, and deference to state authority on one side of the coin, and on the flip side, the successful attempt by one group of Canadians to do down the other. This is real history, real life: as yesterday, so today.
SPECIFICATIONS July 2022 978-0-2280-1179-8 $37.95A, £26.99 paper 6 × 9 272pp eBook available SPECIFICATIONS July 2022 978-0-2280-1180-4 $37.95A, £24.99 paper 6 × 9 336pp eBook available
