author
Isabella Valancy Crawford
1850–1887
An Irish-born Canadian poet and storyteller, she helped shape early Canadian literature with vivid writing rooted in landscape, legend, and everyday struggle. Best known for "Malcolm's Katie," she was also one of the first Canadians to support herself through freelance writing.
1 Audiobook
Old Spookses' Pass, Malcolm's Katie, and other poems
by Isabella Valancy Crawford
About the author
Born in Dublin on December 25, 1850, Isabella Valancy Crawford came to Canada as a child with her family and grew up in several Ontario communities before settling for a time in Peterborough. The places she knew in Ontario, along with her interest in local stories and Indigenous legends as they were represented in nineteenth-century writing, became important parts of her poetry and fiction.
After her father's death, she helped support her family through magazine work, publishing poems, stories, sketches, and articles in Canadian and American periodicals. She is often remembered as one of the first Canadians to make a living as a freelance writer, even though that life was financially difficult.
Crawford died in Toronto on February 12, 1887, still young and not widely celebrated. Her reputation grew strongly after her death, and she is now regarded as one of the key poets of nineteenth-century Canada, especially for works such as Malcolm's Katie and for the energy and richness of her descriptions of the Canadian landscape.