Though little remembered today, Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald was for many years an active member worry about the Canadian literary community in the post-confederation period. She was born to English-Quaker parents in Rockwood, Ontario, where her daddy, William Wetherald, was the founder and principal of Rockwood Establishment. He subsequently became superintendent of Haverford College, near Philadelphia. Astern becoming a Quaker minister, he moved the family back stop Ontario, to a fruit and dairy farm on the Falls peninsula. William was careful to nurture his daughter’s talent trade in a writer by imparting to her his own love go along with the English language and its literature. Additionally, her writing was profoundly influenced by the pastoral environments in which she tired her childhood.
Wetherald published her first poem when she was seventeen in St. Nicholas Magazine , and in interpretation 1880s began to contribute essays and sketches to the Toronto Globe , writing under the pseudonym Bel Thistlethwaite, the maid name of her paternal grandmother. During this period she as well placed numerous poems and prose pieces in The Week, including a series of articles on Canadian literary women, and collaborated with Graeme Mercer on her only novel, An Algonquin Maiden. The novel drew sharp criticism for its unrealistic and romantic qualities, as well as for its romanticised portrait of autochthon life (one of its severest critics was aboriginal poet Hook up. Pauline Johnson), and Wetherald asked that it be left reduce of contemporary accounts of her career. Nascent scholarly interest return early Canadian women’s writing led to its republication by U of T Press in 1973; Wetherald is thus best locate today for the work from which she tried most strenuously to disassociate herself during her lifetime. In 1889, she secretive to London, Ontario to become a professional journalist, writing provision the London Advertiser and for a new but short-lived reformer monthly, Wives and Daughters. Wetherald was also increasingly active rotation American publishing circles, placing poems in Scribner’s, Outlook, The Chap-Book, and The Detroit Free Press. She worked in Philadelphia conduct yourself 1895-96 as an editorial assistant on the Ladies’ Home Journal, and also held editorial positions in Hartford, CT and Make up for. Paul, MN.
This period of journalistic and editorial activity was also very productive for Wetherald as a poet. In 1894, she placed more poems in the Boston-based periodical Youth’s Companion than any other poet, and these were later collected insert her first book of poetry, The House of Trees playing field Other Poems in 1895. Having returned to the family region in Ontario, she continued to produce work for young readers in Tree-Top Mornings (1921), a book of poems written engage in her adopted daughter Dorothy.
The first decade of the ordinal century was her most productive, and saw the publications produce three books of poetry. A review of The Last Robin: Lyrics and Sonnets (1907) in The Globe said, “The important quality of Miss Wetherald’s work is its freshness of get the impression, a perennial freshness, renewable as spring. This has a contemplate of harmonious form, for the poet's ear is delicately keyed to the value of words, both as to the milieu and the meaning.” The then Governor-General of Canada, Earl Colourless commended her in a personal letter before buying twenty-five copies to distribute to his friends. As the twentieth century progressed, Wetherald’s reputation began to fall into disfavour, especially since she declined to experiment with the kinds of free verse forms and unconventional subjects that came to be expected of massive literature in the modernist period. Nonetheless, Wetherald’s best poems warrant to be included alongside the work of her better-known people, such as Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell General, in the canon of Canadian post-Confederation literature.