I might have left "Lady" out of the title. Any Canadian with Sir or Lady before their name seems distinctly passé in our times. We don't have Australia's colourful phrase about a bunyip aristocracy. But we know that whole thing didn't work here either, despite the efforts of families like the Bordens. The wrongest aphorism ever coined about Canadian history is Carl Berger's "[Canadian] Imperialism was a form of nationalism." No, the belief that titled Canadians really could share in running Britain's empire for them always was a form of colonialism.
So I would not rush instinctively to a book about the knights and ladies of the Borden family of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Nova Scotia and Ottawa (and London, England).
But the podcast episode kept me listening throughout -- it's a lively interchange. Maybe we should read The Black Box.
Carmen Miller had already published a book about Sir Frederick Borden, but he could not get much of a grasp of the personality behind the politician until a Borden descendent gave him a black box full of the personal papers of Fred's wife Bessie -- papers Miller says the archives he visited had never found worth acquiring. His conversation with Donald Wright nicely captures the surprises of archival research and the pleasures of family history. From the UTP blurb for the book:
In a remarkable tale of tragedy, war, family conflict, and imperial diplomacy, The Black Box presents a collective biography of four generations of women in an elite Nova Scotia family during the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. These intelligent, educated, artistic women....
Listen and see if you have the same reaction -- and check out a hundred other CanHist conversations there.
