author
Isabella Valancy Crawford
1850–1887
An early Canadian poet and fiction writer, she turned personal hardship into vivid, imaginative work that helped shape the country's literary voice. Her writing is especially remembered for its energy, rich imagery, and feel for the Canadian landscape.
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 moved to Canada with her family as a child and grew up in several Ontario communities before settling for a time in Peterborough. She was the daughter of a physician, and although details of her early life are not always consistent across sources, she is widely recognized as Irish-born and Canadian by career and reputation.
After her father's death in 1875, she helped support her family through freelance writing, publishing poetry, fiction, and articles in Canadian and American magazines and newspapers. That made her one of the first Canadians known to earn a living in this way, even though she lived with persistent financial strain.
Crawford died in Toronto on February 12, 1887. She is now regarded as a major 19th-century Canadian poet, admired for the freshness of her language, her strong storytelling sense, and her memorable evocations of nature and place.