Aleta Day (Virago Modern Classics) - Softcover

Beynon, Francis Marion

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140162259 ISBN 13: 9780140162257

Publisher: Penguin Group USA, 1991

Synopsis

Francis Marion Beynon (26 May 1884 - 5 October 1951) was a Canadian journalist, feminist and pacifist. She is known for her semi-autobiographical novel Aleta Day (1919). Francis Marion Beynon was born in Streetsville, Ontario on 26 May 1884. Her parents were James Barnes Benyon (1835–1907) and Rebecca (Manning) Beynon (1847–1898). They married in 1872. Both parents were convinced Methodists, a faith she would later reject, and teetallers. Her sister was Lillian Beynon Thomas (1874–1961). Her family moved to Manitoba in 1889 when she was a child and took up farming in the Hartney district. She earned a teaching certificate and taught near Carman for some time. Around 1909 Beynon and her sister moved to Winnipeg, where Francis found work in the advertising department of the T. Eaton Company, a department store. Both sisters were active in fighting for women's suffrage, changes to dower legislation and the right of women to homestead. From 1912 to 1917 Beynon edited the woman's pages ("The Country Homemaker's Page" and "The Sunshine Guild") of the Grain Growers' Guide. She also was responsible for the children's pages under the pseudonym "Dixie Patton" and wrote an anonymous column, "Country Girl's Ideas." She used the women's pages to discuss women's suffrage, women's work, marriage and the family. Beynon and her sister helped found the Quill Club and the Winnipeg branch of the Canadian Women's Press Club. She was one of the organizers of the Manitoba Political Equality League, which led the struggle in Manitoba for women's suffrage. Beynon was a social feminist. She accepted that women should be responsible for care of the home and of children, but felt this should not preclude them from education, property rights and discussion of political issues. She felt that women should stand on their own feet, and that husband and wife should share responsibility and success. During World War I (1914–18) Beynon supported giving all immigrants the right to vote, opposed conscription without a plebiscite, and believed these issues should be freely discussed in public. She, her sister Lillian, Nellie McClung and Ella Cora Hind helped bring about the defeat of Rodmond Roblin's Manitoba government in 1915, and helped ensure that his successor T.C. Norris gave full suffrage to women in provincial elections from 1916.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Francis Marion Beynon's autobiographical novel Aleta Dey is increasingly recognised as a small classic of early twentieth-century fiction. Beynon was a journalist and feminist much involved in public affairs in early twentieth-century Manitoba. In 1917, aged 33, she was forced to leave her job as a result of her open pacifism, and she soon moved to New York where she dropped out of the public eye. Aleta Dey, first published in 1919, tells in plain and affecting prose the story of a girl growing up in Manitoba, becoming politically conscious, and falling in love with McNair, a man of much more conventional views. The First World War brings a crisis for them both after McNair enlists as a soldier.

Though Beynon was a Canadian, her spare, emotionally open prose may have less in common with that of other Canadian writers of the time than it does with the style of contemporaneous western American women writers such as Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Like Cather's My Antonia, Beynon's Aleta Dey resonates with prairie simplicity, passion, and strength.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Group USA
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0140162259
• ISBN 13: 9780140162257
• Binding: Paperback