Trent Archivist’s Book Celebrates the Life of Frances Stewart

My coverage of the launch of Jodi Aoki’s Revisiting “Our Forest Home”: The Immigrant Letters of Frances Stewart. For the full story, please visit Trent University’s News Feed (click here)

Excerpt:

An enthusiastic audience packed Trent University’s Alumni House on Thursday, July 21, braving the hottest day of the year to celebrate the launch of Jodi Aoki’s new book, Revisiting “Our Forest Home”: The Immigrant Letters of Frances Stewart.

Sixty or so guests were on hand as Ms. Aoki signed copies of the work and read passages.

Revisiting “Our Forest Home” weaves the story of one of the area’s earliest settlers, chronicling Frances Stewart’s captivating life in her own words through correspondence.

The book captures three important stages of Frances Stewart’s life: her childhood years in Ireland; her voyage to Canada and settlement in the Peterborough area in 1823; and the period of her widowhood, leading to her death in 1872.

Key passages extracted from letters written by others further the story of the nineteenth-century immigrant’s life.

“These letters are a valuable contribution to the history of the area and to the study of the female immigrant experience,” explained Ms. Aoki. “For many years I’ve been interested in Frances’s representation of her experience in the Canadian bush. Her letters provide a tremendous opportunity to examine a nineteenth-century life and to consider it in the larger context of a nation’s expansion during its formative years.”

For the full story, please visit Trent University’s News Feed (click here)