Rains, a former soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, immigrated to Canada at the same period as Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. He brought with him his wards, sisters Frances and Elizabeth. The three settled on St Joseph Island in northern Ontario, where their unusual domestic arrangement caught the attention and imagination of, among others, the nineteenth-century British travel-writer Anna Jameson, the Swiss born naturalist and explorer Louis Agassiz, the American poet William Cullen Bryant, and the Canadian novelist Marian Engel.

Marian Engel was a Canadian novelist. Engel's best-known novel is Bear, and her other novels include No Clouds of Glory, The Honeyman Festival, The Glassy Sea, and Lunatic Villas. She won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction for Bear in 1976, and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1982. Marian Engel died in Toronto in 1985.

Marian Engel's profile page

Christl Verduyn is the author, editor, or co-editor of over a dozen volumes in the areas of Canadian and Québécois literatures, women’s writing and criticism, “multicultural” and life writing, and Canadian Studies. Before joining the faculty at Mount Allison University, where she is now Professor Emerita of English and Canadian Studies, Dr. Verduyn taught at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she chaired the Canadian Studies Program, and at Trent University, where she was Chair of Women’s Studies (1987-90) and Chair of Canadian Studies (1993-99). A past editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies, recipient of the Governor General’s International Award for Canadian Studies and of the Order of Canada (CM), she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) and a 3M National Teaching Fellow.

Christl Verduyn's profile page