author
George R. Ray
1869–1935
An adventurer, politician, and novelist, this little-known writer drew on real experience in the North to tell stories set around Hudson Bay. His life moved from England to Africa to Canada, giving his fiction an unusually wide horizon.
1 Audiobook
Kasba (White Partridge): A Story of Hudson Bay
by George R. Ray
About the author
Born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, on November 30, 1869, George Raymond Ray worked as an accountant in London and Africa, served in the Royal Navy from 1888 to 1891, and moved to Canada in 1899. He later became private secretary to former Manitoba lieutenant governor James Colebrooke Patterson and also served for a short time in Manitoba's Legislative Assembly.
Ray is especially interesting to readers because he also worked in the Hudson's Bay trade. Records from the Hudson's Bay Company show him serving in northern posts in the early 1900s and again in the 1920s, experiences that seem to have informed Kasba (White Partridge): A Story of Hudson Bay. That novel is the work he is best known for today.
He died on October 13, 1935, after falling ill while in the Northwest. Though not a famous literary figure, Ray left behind fiction shaped by firsthand knowledge of remote Canadian life, which gives his writing a vivid sense of place.