Written primarily by Daisy Phillips, with a few by her husband Jack, to her family in England, these letters describe the creation of a shortlived English home in the Windermere Valley of southwestern British Columbia. Not given to introspection, Daisy registers her immediate and frank reactions to her new environment and startling new way of life. From her letters we learn of the experiences of the Phillips and their neighbours in settling the newly opened land and of their attempts to grow fruit in an area with limited agricultural potential.

R. Cole Harris' profile page

Elizabeth Philips is the author of three previous collections of poetry, most recently A Blue with Blood in it and Beyond my Keeping. Both collections received the Saskatchewan Poetry Award for their respective years. She has edited numerous poetry collections and has taught creative writing in the Banff Wired Studio, the Banff Writing with Style program, and the Sage Hill Writing Experience. She edited the literary magazine Grain from 1998 to 2003. She lives in Saskatoon.

Elizabeth Phillips' profile page

One of the many values of Letters from Windermere is the light they shed on the experiences of a middle-class woman emigrant .... The letters will be a gold mine for those interested in the domestic taste of the period.

B.C. Historical News

This poignant tale of thwarted hope has been transformed into a most attractive book ... It is a very interesting individual story, and a valuable set of primary documents well supported by R. Cole Harris’s helpful introduction.

The British Journal of Canadian Studies

As for the letters themselves, they are, quite simply, splendid. Thanks to Daisy's penchant for detail we are treated to a day-to-day account of the lives of these expatriate gentlefolk. We learn what they ate, what they wore, what they read ... We begin to see how they thought and how they viewed their world. Altogether, Letters from Windermere has an intimacy and immediacy that sets it above the usual ruck of immigrants' memoirs.

Pacific Northwest Quarterly