On the Night Table of Roy MacSkimming
Photo: David Zimmerly
As a writer at work on historical fiction, I cheerfully admit to living in the past. While researching and writing my novel Macdonald, I spent most of my time in 1891, Sir John A.’s final year of life and power.
Currently my subject is Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The title of my novel-in-progress is Laurier in Love. I’m embedded daily with Laurier, his wife Zoë, and his chère amie Émilie Lavergne, and inevitably my reading is almost totally focused on my topic. Although hardly an exhaustive Laurier bibliography, here are some of the works I’ve been reading.
The most titillating is Dearest Émilie: The Love Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier to Madame Émilie Lavergne, edited by Charles Fisher. It contains forty of Laurier’s intimate letters revealing the passionate complexity of his relationship with Émilie, but leaving unanswered the fascinating question — did they or didn’t they?
An early two-volume biography, O.D. Skelton’s Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, was authoritative and influential for its time and remains highly readable. Skelton, a scholar who went on to become under-secretary of state for external affairs in the Mackenzie King era, shaped not only Canadian foreign policy but the Liberal Party version of Laurier.
Forty years later, in the 1960s, the popular historian Joseph Schull produced Laurier: The First Canadian, a vivid, full-dress biography written with panache and feeling. The most recent biography in English, Laurier LaPierre’s opinionated Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the Romance of Canada, is more informal and enlivened with anecdote.
Three other volumes place Laurier in context. For the social and political backdrop to his transformative time in government, no better guide exists than Sandra Gwyn’s brilliant The Private Capital: Ambition and Love in the Age of Macdonald and Laurier.
Heather Robertson provocatively analyzes Laurier’s relationships with Zoë and Émilie in More than a Rose: Prime Ministers, Wives and Other Women, her study of the wives and significant others in the lives of Canadian leaders. And in The Presidents and the Prime Ministers, journalist and biographer Lawrence Martin explores how Laurier and other PMs handled the crucial matter of Canada’s relations with the United States.
None of these titles is recent, and therefore books on Laurier from the perspective of today are sadly lacking. But then, that’s why I’m writing my novel.
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