In many countries, the work of women writers has been excluded from or only selectively admitted to the canon - those books included in school reading lists, analysed by students of literature at universities, and alluded to with respect by critics. In Canada, however, any history of the national literature would certainly include many women writers, from Susanna Moodie, Isabella Valancy Crawford and Sara Jeannette Duncan, to Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. Many of these ‘canonised’ women were of Scottish descent, and virtually all of them were very heavily influenced by Scottish writers from Scott to Spark. Perhaps the hint of heather had much to do with the relative ease with which these writers leapt over the prejudices of male teachers, editors, publishers and critics, since a colonial devotion to the old country persisted long after Scots no longer predominated in the demographic mix in Canada.

But in Canada, as elsewhere, there was an equally interesting group of women whose work has not survived as part of the canon, in spite of their enormous popularity and the respect they aroused in their own time. This group would include Margaret Murray Robertson, May Agnes Fleming, L. M. Montgomery, Marshall Saunders, Nellie McClung, Marian Keith and Grace Campbell - again mostly of Scottish descent and again heavily indebted to Scottish writers, though unfortunately for their ultimate reputation, they modelled their work on Scottish writers who have also slipped from prominence: Catherine Sinclair, Mrs Oliphant, and the Kailyard novelists, especially J. M. Barrie.

Both groups transplanted and naturalised Scottish themes, techniques and topics; then they hybridised the work of the Scots by adding a female twist to stories devised by men. In Tradition in Exile, John Matthews compared the process of new country growth from old country roots to the development of a banyan tree. In Canada, the new growth not only came up Canadian, it also came up feminine.

Let me illustrate this hybridising process first by looking at a woman who was not Scottish but who responded to Scottish literary material. Susanna Moodie emigrated from England in 1832.