4.Barefoot in Sapphires

     Painting Louise de Kiriline Lawrence*

AMY C. WALLACE


 

“Birds make excellent friends.”[1]

-Anonymous

 

The notion that birds make excellent friends would have, only a year ago, seemed a childish idea to me. However, having come across the above statement as I was nearing the end of the almost two years of research that culminated in this exhibition, this simple proclamation resonated with me, and I found myself willing to contemplate its underlying implications. I read the sentence in a pamphlet entitled “Lessons on Bird Protection” created by Canada’s Department of the Interior, a governmental body in existence from 1873 to 1936 that promoted the colonization of the Canadian wilderness. The document, intended for use in schools to teach children and adolescents the well-intended, albeit anthropocentric, lesson of “the value of birds to man,”[2] was published in 1927. It was in this same year that a resolute Swedish woman, having endured the atrocities of the Russian Revolution while working as a nurse in northern Russia, decided to find a new life in Canada. Her new life would be one characterized largely by an appreciation much like the one endorsed in the pamphlet: an understanding of the significance of the natural world, in particular of the value of birds. A pioneer in more ways than one, the woman I write of would go on to demonstrate through her life’s work, which was fully intertwined with her way of living, that while the statement “birds make excellent friends” itself is a simple one, embracing it whole-heartedly can produce an outcome that is far from simple.

Swedish aristocrat, Bolshevik concentration camp survivor, revolutionary widow, world-renowned nurse, gifted linguist, strict atheist, prolific writer, dedicated conservationist, and friend of the birds, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence defeats any attempt at categorization. Efforts to situate her amidst Elizabeth Simcoe, Susanna Moodie and other historic women of the Canadian wilderness are unproductive. Her log house, nestled in the forest of Pimisi Bay near North Bay, Ontario, was the visual manifestation of her unique set of experiences. A hybrid of aristocratic opulence and Canadiana, her tiny cabin was adorned with snowshoes and taxidermy fish as well as with precious family heirlooms and antique tapestries that dated as far back as the  eighteenth century. De Kiriline Lawrence, herself the progenitor of her cabin’s hybridized décor, was of course the embodiment of her hybrid style. In an article she wrote about de Kiriline Lawrence in 1989, the Canadian writer Merilyn Simonds (then Mohr) recounts a story that is telling of de Kiriline Lawrence’s inimitable character:

Murray Speirs, a meteorologist stationed at the military base in North Bay, and his wife Doris were avid bird watchers, particularly interested in the evening grosbeak. When they arrived on Louise’s woodland doorstep on one of their birding treks, she was barefoot, with sapphires dangling from her ears, the very picture of the aristocratic recluse.[3]

*

The door to Louise de Kiriline Lawrence’s life first opened up to me in the summer of 2008 while I was working at the Callander Bay Heritage Museum, located in the former home and office of Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe – the famous doctor of the Dionne quintuplets. Each room of the home is devoted to remembering a particular aspect of the town’s history. What once was the waiting room is now used to display the uniforms, instruments, and medicine vials that at one time belonged to various nurses in the town’s history. After arriving in Canada, but before dedicating her life fully to ornithology and writing, de Kiriline Lawrence continued in her career as a nurse, and it is in the former waiting room where de Kiriline Lawrence is remembered. One photograph on display shows the nurse travelling with her dog team, her preferred mode of transportation in the winter months. Another photograph captures her posing with five tiny, identical babies – the Dionne quintuplets – de Kiriline Lawrence having played a crucial role in keeping the infants alive during the first year of their lives. Of all the artifacts that have found a home in the small museum, each embedded with the histories and memories of the individuals associated with them, I found myself most intrigued by objects associated with de Kiriline Lawrence. I was motivated to read her autobiography Another Winter, Another Spring: A Love Remembered by the desire to gain not only a greater understanding of the whole of de Kiriline Lawrence’s story, but also of my own attraction to the museum’s artifacts associated with her. I discovered, as this essay will reveal, that my fascination largely stemmed from a single question: Why, of all the cities, towns, and villages in the world, did Louise de Kiriline Lawrence settle so humbly on Pimisi Bay? Moreover, what did the association between myself and de Kiriline Lawrence, connected as we were through place, mean, if it meant anything at all? 

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Remembering her ten years after her death, local historian Doug Mackey has rightly pointed out that de Kiriline Lawrence “led several lives, any one of which is a story in itself.”[4] Indeed, it is hard to imagine that one person could, within a single lifetime, accomplish all that de Kiriline Lawrence did, and perhaps her biography is more easily grasped when its gestalt is fragmented. In her photo album, de Kiriline Lawrence herself divides her life, giving the following, simple captions to three portraits of herself: “Louise – before Russia”; “As a bride 1918”; and “After Russia.”[5] Here, I borrow de Kiriline Lawrence’s division of time to present a highly condensed biography for the reader.

Louise – before Russia

Louise de Kiriline Lawrence was born Louise Flach in 1894 on the Baltic Sea coast of Sweden. She was born into a prominent, aristocratic family; her namesake and godmother was Princess Louise of Denmark, a dear friend of de Kiriline Lawrence’s mother, Hillevid Neergaard. Her father, Sixten Flach, was a naturalist who impressed upon his daughter at an early age the wonders of nature and the importance of conservation around their family estate, Svensksund. In 1914, de Kiriline Lawrence was officially introduced into society in the court of King Gustaf V of Sweden.[6]

As a bride 1918

Shortly after her official introduction, de Kiriline Lawrence decided to train to become a nurse. This decision brought her, during the First World War, to a prisoner-of-war exchange camp in Horserød, Denmark, where she met her first husband, Gleb de Kiriline, an officer in the Russian White Army. After their marriage, Gleb de Kiriline left Denmark for Russia, where, despite the protests of her family and Gleb, de Kiriline Lawrence eventually followed him in 1919 at the age of twenty-four. To travel to Archangel to work as a war nurse where her husband was stationed, de Kiriline Lawrence had to stow away on a boat on which women were prohibited. After the collapse of the front lines and an unsuccessful retreat, the Bolsheviks imprisoned de Kiriline Lawrence and her husband.[7] The horror of travelling in the dark of night in northern Russia under the extreme stress of their circumstances is recounted in de Kiriline Lawrence’s autobiography:

For three more days we forged ahead; the trail behind us was littered with the frozen carcasses of fallen horses. Occasionally the lone figure of an exhausted man sat huddled by the wayside, unable to move. And the fate he was destined to meet after the last sleigh passed him defied speculation.[8]

As a Swedish national, de Kiriline Lawrence was eventually released by the Bolsheviks and separated from her husband, who was transferred to another prisoner-of-war camp. Following the Revolution, de Kiriline Lawrence searched for her husband while working as a relief delegate with the Swedish Red Cross Expedition during the Russian famine, which lasted from 1921 to 1924, but she never did see him again.[9]

After Russia

De Kiriline Lawrence began a new life after immigrating to Canada in 1927, and the accomplishments she achieved here are as numerous as they are diverse. Apart from being a significant figure in the survival of the Dionne quintuplets (she was their head nurse during the first year of their lives), de Kiriline Lawrence published seven books and seventeen scientific articles and was a regular contributor to Audubon magazine, the premier ornithology periodical.[10] She retired from nursing in 1935 and retreated to her cabin, a decision that represented the beginning of a remarkable life dedicated to her observations of the everyday in the natural world. She married carpenter Leonard (Len) Lawrence four years later.[11] By 1954, de Kiriline Lawrence became the first Canadian woman to become an Elective Member of the American Ornithologists Union. She received numerous awards and distinctions in her lifetime, including the Jubilee Medal from King George V, the John Burroughs’ Memorial Award for natural history writing, the Sir G. D. Roberts Special Award, Francis H Kortright Outdoor Writing Award, and an Honorary LL.D. from Laurentian University.[12] In 1989 when de Kiriline Lawrence was 94 years old, her close friend and noted ornithologist Dr. Robert Nero remarked, “There is no one else of her stature in the field of ornithology today.”[13] Two years later, Nero published a collection of poems in honour of de Kiriline Lawrence entitled Woman by the Shore and other poems: A Tribute to Louise de Kiriline Lawrence. In reading his poetry, the same level of appreciation and awe de Kiriline Lawrence held for nature is immediately apparent:


Is this old age
I wondered
to stand and admire a dead leaf –
or am I finally learning
to see?[14]

٭

Instead of satisfying my curiosity, reading de Kiriline Lawrence’s autobiography only heightened my desire to understand my initial fascination with her story. I realized that I was thinking of the writer as a distant, historical figure – not as an individual who had, in fact, inhabited the very same northern country in which I had been raised. I began to search for other connections to de Kiriline Lawrence to cement my understanding of her as someone to whom, through place, I felt somehow related. However, I found myself immediately confronted by the question: How can I forge new connections to an individual whose life was so different from my own, whose existence almost entirely preceded my own?

I found a number of solutions to this problem. I compiled lists of books she had read and mapped the places she had been, hoping that in reading the same words and in tracing her paths I might forge the kind of connection that comes concomitant with shared experience. In an attempt to channel some mutual appreciation of their physicality, I sketched the same birds that she studied season after season around her property. I combed the local used bookstores for her writing and delighted when I found a personally signed copy of one of her books.

I found these books to possess a “that-has-been,”[15] quality, an essence the French theorist Roland Barthes articulated in relation to photographs but that here I apply to objects. While different aspects in a photograph will stand out to different and particular viewers, the quality of “that-has-been” is one that pierces the viewer, having gained its sharpened edge when an awareness of time is brought to the reading of the photograph. For Barthes, the realization that this quality is the ultimate distinguishing characteristic of photography came when searching for a photograph of his mother that truly captured her being (surprisingly, the photograph he found that fulfilled this criterion was one taken when his mother was only five). The books that I collected functioned as reliquaries for me; they contained a part of de Kiriline Lawrence in the same way that Barthes’ photograph contained a part of his mother. Similarly, the objects in the Callander museum, though long dissociated from de Kiriline Lawrence, still evoked her presence.

In considering the objects in this way, I am also drawing on Susan Sontag’s writing on photography and its relationship to absence. The books I collected possessed a “pseudo-presence”[16] and provided, to use Sontag’s apt description, “like a wood fire in a room … incitements to reverie.”[17] Collecting ephemera directly or indirectly associated with de Kiriline Lawrence seemed to evoke her presence, which I felt most strongly when it came in the form of a memento mori. On the cover page of the first book of de Kiriline Lawrence’s that I purchased, her autobiography, is scrawled in a shaky hand:

To Vivien with love Louise de Kiriline Lawrence

Beneath this inscription, in a different, steadier hand and in a blue ink, almost obtrusive in relation to de Kiriline Lawrence’s faint scroll above, is written, “Deceased on April 27, 1992 @ 0200 hrs.”

٭

I travelled to Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa to continue my research for the project. Here, in perpetuity, are housed all of de Kiriline Lawrence’s ornithological notes, bird diaries, migration charts, professional and personal correspondence, manuscripts, photo albums, and other ephemera that accumulates from a life of constant inquiry into both the self and the other. I spent three days in the archives, turning the pages of her diaries, comparing her manuscripts, deciphering her ornithological notes and charts, and yet had time to explore only a fraction of her collection housed there. As material traces of her life, these objects, like the signed books, possessed a “having-been-thereness,” only now my perception of this endowment was enhanced as I had before me original manuscripts – her original creative output – decorated in her own hand with deletions, insertions, and margin notes.

The form of the “having-been-thereness” that I was experiencing in relation to objects associated with de Kiriline Lawrence was transformed once more when I made a visit, thanks to a friend and the kind current owners of her former home, to the Loghouse Nest, the name she gave to her cabin. While the beginning of this project was characterized by the search for traces and other significant objects that would forge a connection between de Kiriline Lawrence and myself, after visiting her cabin, I realized that I then embodied, in a small amount, the “that-has-been” attribute that had propelled me in my research for the past year. I had walked the same paths she walked daily, stood where her writing desk once was, and looked through the same window through which she studied the birds. After this visit, I imagined that I had made a connection to de Kiriline Lawrence that, though found through place, also went beyond it. But what did all this mean, and what was the value that I saw in de Kiriline Lawrence’s lifestyle in relation to her creative output? As I have argued, if de Kiriline Lawrence and I shared any common ground at all, it was the physical ground we stood on, and so approaching these questions through the lens of place seemed appropriate.

٭

De Kiriline Lawrence’s cabin is located on Pimisi Bay and, as writer Lucy Lippard acknowledges in her book The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, “Every place name is a story, an outcropping of the shared tales that form the bedrock of community.”[18] In The Lovely and the Wild, de Kiriline Lawrence writes that the First Nations’ term Pimisi translates roughly to “I rest over here”[19] – a fitting name to characterize de Kiriline Lawrence’s relationship to her home there. Located on the Mattawa River, which flows into the Ottawa River, Pimisi Bay is some 300 kilometres north of Toronto. The driveway off the highway does not extend to the cabin; from the road, the existence of her home remains a secret to the unenlightened passer-by. On the surface, this hidden location can appear as a place of passive refuge, the preference of a semi-recluse.

The relating of passiveness to nature in part reflects Western society’s conflation of woman and Nature, a misguided confusion that is evident in metaphors such as “Mother Earth,” “virgin forest,” and “the rape of the land” that enforce the domination of both women and Nature.[20] In her essay “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” feminist cultural critic bell hooks reconsiders places on the edge as potential sites of resistance, offering an alternative framework in which to consider de Kiriline Lawrence’s choice to live and work in her Loghouse Nest. The use of space, real or imagined, is inherently political, and hooks describes margins as locations in which the occupier chooses to remain because of their inherent capacity to incite resistance. In this usage, margins are distinct from other outskirt locations that are the result of oppression because of the very possibility of resistance that the former offers. Radical thinking, she argues, manifests very often in these situations in a form that intertwines with one’s everyday habits.[21] In her position of geographic marginality, place and lifestyle were undeniably bound to de Kiriline Lawrence’s artistic and scientific output. Perhaps de Kiriline Lawrence’s search for solitude in the northern wilderness was, to quote bell hooks, the search for a “radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.”[22]

If de Kiriline Lawrence’s choice of home offered her a venue for resistance, her choice of art form constituted another such mode. In Treasures of the Place: Three Centuries of Nature Writing in Canada, Wayne Grady outlines the uniqueness of nature writing, noting that the genre is much more than physical description and often crosses the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. He argues that nature writers, in their deliberate conflation of fact and fiction – often an attempt to elevate nature to the same level as civilization – were in a sense avant-garde in such a postmodern approach to viewing the world.[23] Postmodernism, characterized by the breaking down of disciplinary boundaries and a markedly self-conscious approach to studying historical canons and the methodology underlying them, has now been thoroughly entrenched in academic inquiry. It is a fascinating observation that nature writers, de Kiriline Lawrence included, in their very often isolated environments, were working in such a postmodern spirit long before the tides of Postmodernism as a movement began to sweep Western society’s collective conscious.

This approach is perhaps most apparent in de Kiriline Lawrence’s earliest and unpublished bird diaries in which she addressed her entries to the birds themselves, greatly anthropomorphizing them in the process. In these journals, any hierarchical distinction between human and animal has been completely dispelled, resulting in a disordering ambiguity: her words read as though penned to a dear friend or even to a lover. Eschewing any semblance of a scientific gaze, de Kiriline Lawrence wrote directly to the “friend at the end of [her] pen.”[24] An entry from April 22, 1941, addressed to the Common Loon reads:

I have been wondering about you! The lake has been open a week, you know. But I heard you laughing this morning and I love your laughter.[25]

To a Cardinal on April 12, 1942, she writes:

I think you have gone. I haven’t heard you or seen you today. And the whole bush has lost something deliciously exotic in your absence. You must have gone to seek a mate. How can I wish you to stay?[26]

De Kiriline Lawrence’s preference for the particular reflects a similar postmodern sensibility. Her inclination towards humbler subjects is most obviously displayed in one of her last published books, Mar, a summary written in the form of a narrative of the longitudinal observations de Kiriline Lawrence made about a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker that she named Mar. It is a comprehensive and intimate study of not just a bird species but of one bird in particular and represents years of careful observation. Reflecting on her motivations for creating the work, de Kiriline Lawrence writes in the foreword:

The dramatic and the sensational seldom yield the treasures of enlightenment that the commonplace and the unpretentious often harbour unsuspected. For being as much a part of the whole as the rarity and the spectacular, the same and the ordinary miss the disadvantages of distortion and exaggeration in displaying the simple facts.[27]

٭

Eventually, the deliberate construction of associations between de Kiriline Lawrence and myself became less about finding answers and more about the process itself, a process that became very revealing of the nature of History. As Barthes writes, “Thus, the life of someone whose existence has somewhat preceded our own encloses in its particularity the very tension of History.”[28] In a sense, this project was an exercise in expanding my own particularity in an attempt to reach someone else’s. The result of this process was the creation of my own narratives that re-imagine de Kiriline Lawrence’s story in the works of art I created that form this exhibition.

Lippard writes, “Narratives articulate relationships between teller and told, here and there, past and present. In the absence of shared past experience in a multicentered society, storytelling and old photographs take on a heightened intensity.”[29] Quoting two other writers, Susan Scarberry and Reyes Roberto Garcia, she connects storytelling to place, “The place is ‘the heart of storytelling … the imaginative act of bringing together self and earth, culture and nature.”[30] In this project, it was place that brought de Kiriline Lawrence and I together. Her stories emerged from place, infused as they are within it, and I read them not only in her published work but also in the flight of a Chickadee that inspired them and in the grain of the weathered logs that form the cabin where she penned them. She the teller, I the told, and like the first robin in spring, what de Kiriline Lawrence had to share has never ceased to be a welcome reminder of the friendships and renewal that can be found through nature. De Kiriline Lawrence has taught me never to overlook the small things, and especially not the birds.

٭

I close with de Kiriline Lawrence’s own words. In the 1930s, de Kiriline Lawrence wrote a series of articles for Chatelaine, primarily about her experiences with the Dionnes. The subject of one of these articles, however, diverged significantly from the others and contained the answer – in de Kiriline Lawrence’s own words – to the question that had propelled me through this project: “Why did you come to Canada?” In an article with this title, in a women’s magazine from almost three quarters of a century ago, I read de Kiriline Lawrence’s own analysis of her motivations to rest, of all places, after her remarkable journey, at Pimisi Bay in The Loghouse Nest:


It happened that my young Russian husband was stationed at Pinega as a liaison officer between the British troops and the Russian White Army. And I was with him, serving as a nurse in the British soldiers’ ward of the Russian hospital. It also happened that when [an] English flier unhooked the bombs from the undercarriage of his plane to remove them to the ammunition storeroom, one of them exploded. Shortly afterward, suffering from bad burns, he was admitted to the hospital and put into my charge. . . . [W]ith the eloquence of eager enthusiasm he filled my ears with fascinating tales of a far-off country of the gods – Canada.

He spoke of the small log cabin hidden among the snow-heavy pines in the woods. It squats close to the ground, trustfully and humbly. . . . I caught but a vision of unlimited space and open fresh air, of freedom of movement and freedom of mind. Thus, with the enthralled brush of the Englishman, I painted my own picture of Canada.
. . . .
Then in the course of our long trail from prison to prison-camp, my husband and I looked out upon our uncertain future. . . . Our eyes went far beyond my native Sweden to Canada, the new land of promise and individual freedom, of which the Englishman had spoken so glowingly.
. . . .
But out of the turmoil in Russia I came back to Sweden alone.
. . . .
Slowly and painfully I tried to recatch life as it had been before I met it full-face in Russia. I strove to match my stride to that of those now surrounding me, whose daily interests were a new novel, the latest Pirandello play, or Madame X’s afternoon tea, not simple preservation of life.
. . . .
Again, as once before by the barred window of the prison cell in Russia, within the range of my vision came Canada. Space and fresh air, how I longed for them, how I craved them. And the vast landscape of Canada must be so much alike to that of Russia, the prairies, the forests, the space. Could there, in this resemblance, be a remedy for my futile longing to look back?
. . . .
And so one bright day of spring I broke with the old and turned my face toward the new. With enough money in my pocket to travel about for three or four months and – in case of need – for a return passage, I crossed the ocean to find out whether my picture of Canada carried a good resemblance to the original.
. . . .
Thus I came to Canada, not to nurse a broken heart, but to tend to something new that impetuously pressed through to live out the shattered fragments of a lost episode. And of all countries I chose Canada, because she, I knew, possessed the unspoiled soil, the life-giving space, the fresh winds that promote spontaneous growth.[31]

٭

*This essay was written to accompany the exhibition The Loghouse Nest: An Exploration of the Life and Work of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence shown at the artLAB Concourse Gallery from January 26 to February 10, 2010, and at the W.K.P. Kennedy Gallery in North Bay, Ontario, from February 17 to March 11, 2010.

 

Notes

1. Lessons on Bird Protection (Ottawa: Department of the Interior, 1927), 8.

2. Ibid., 5.

3. Merilyn Mohr, “To Whom the Wilderness Speaks: The remarkable life of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence.” Harrowsmith 13 (1989): 77.

4. Doug Mackey, “Heritage Perspectives: Remembering the Late, Great Lady: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence,” Community Voices (May 2002): http://www.pastforward.ca/perspectives/may_102002.htm.

5. Louise de Kiriline Lawrence Collection, Photo album, Library and Archives Canada, accession number 1993-199 C 0492, box 2000586356.

6. De Kiriline Lawrence, Another Winter, 1-29; Mohr, “To Whom,” 74-75; Edward W. Laine, “Biographical Note for Louise de Kiriline Lawrence,” in Finding Aid No. 1742 (Ottawa: National Archives of Canada, 1993).

7. De Kiriline Lawrence, Another Winter, 30-267; Mohr, “To Whom,” 75; Laine, “Biographical Note.”

8. De Kiriline Lawrence, Another Winter, 171.

9. De Kiriline Lawrence, Another Winter, 200-267; Mohr, “To Whom,” 75; Laine, “Biographical Note.”

10. Mohr, “To Whom the Wilderness Speaks,” 74.

11. Ibid., 76; Laine, “Biographical Note.”

12. Mohr, “To Whom the Wilderness Speaks,” 76, 78, 81; Marianna Gosztonyi Ainley, “In Memoriam: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, 1894-1992,” The Auk 109, no. 4 (1992): 909-10.

13. Mohr, “To Whom the Wilderness Speaks,” 74.

14. Robert W. Nero, Woman by the Shore and Other Poems: A Tribute to Louise de Kiriline Lawrence (Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1990), 14.

15. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 77.

16. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Delta, 1973), 16.

17. Ibid.

18. Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 46.

19. Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, The Lovely and the Wild (Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1987), 22.

20. Tzeporah Berman, “ The Rape of Mother Nature? Women in the Language of Environmental Discourse,” in The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment, eds. Alwin Fill and Peter Mühlhäusler (London: Continuum, 2001), 258-259.

21. bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004), 157

22. Ibid.

23. Wayne Grady, introduction to Treasures of the Place: Three Centuries of Nature Writing in Canada, ed. Wayne Grady (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992), 8-10.

24. Kathleen Adams, Journal to the Self (New York: Warner Books, 1990) 13, quoted in Betty Jane Wylie, Reading Between the Lines: The Diaries of Women (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1995), ix.

25. Library and Archives Canada, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence fonds, MG 31, J 18, “Wildlife Studies and Ornithological Reports” series, volume 6, file 7 “Notes on Birds Around Our Home,” book I, page 30.

26. Library and Archives Canada, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence fonds, MG 31, J 18, “Wildlife Studies and Ornithological Reports” series, volume 6, file 8 “Notes on Birds Around Our Home,” book II, page 12.

27. Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, foreword to Mar: A Glimpse into the Natural Life of a Bird (Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1986).

28. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 65.

29. Lippard, The Lure, 50.

30. Ibid.

31. Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, “Why Did You Come to Canada?,” Chatelaine, October 1937: 21, 53.

 

 

Bibliography

Ainley, Marianna Gosztonyi. “In Memoriam: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, 1894-1992.” The Auk 109, no. 4 (1992): 909-10.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Berman, Tzeporah. “The Rape of Mother Nature? Women in the Language of Environmental Discourse.” In The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment, edited by Alwin Fill and Peter Mühlhäusler, 258-269. London: Continuum, 2001.

Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

De Kiriline Lawrence, Louise. Another Winter, Another Spring: A Love Remembered. Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1987.

---. Mar: A Glimpse into the Natural Life of a Bird. Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1986.

---. The Lovely and the Wild. Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1987.

---. “Why Did You Come to Canada?” Chatelaine, October 1937, 21 & 53.

Gibbons, Joan. Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007.

Grady, Wayne. Introduction to Treasures of the Place: Three Centuries of Nature Writing in Canada, edited by Wayne Grady. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre,1992.

hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” In The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, edited by Sandra Harding, 153-159. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Laine, Edward W. “Biographical Note for Louise de Kiriline Lawrence.” In Finding Aid No. 1742. Ottawa: National Archives of Canada, 1993.

Library and Archives Canada, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence fonds, MG 31, J 18, “Wildlife Studies and Ornithological Reports” series, volume 8, file “Daily records”, July 14, 1953.

Lippard, Lucy R. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: The New Press, 1997.

Mackey, Doug. “Heritage Perspectives: Remembering the Late, Great Lady: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence.” Community Voices (May 2002): http://www.pastforward.ca/perspectives/
may_102002.htm.

Mohr, Marilyn. “To Whom the Wilderness Speaks: The remarkable life of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence.” Harrowsmith 13, (1989): 72-81.

Nero, Robert W. Woman by the Shore and Other Poems: A Tribute to Louise de Kiriline Lawrence. Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1990.

Lessons on Bird Protection. Ottawa: Department of the Interior, 1927.

Library and Archives Canada, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence fonds, MG 31, J 18, “Wildlife Studies and Ornithological Reports” series, volume 6, file 7 “Notes on Birds Around Our Home,” book I, page 30.

Library and Archives Canada, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence fonds, MG 31, J 18, “Wildlife Studies and Ornithological Reports” series, volume 6, file 8 “Notes on Birds Around Our Home,” book II, page 12.

Louise de Kiriline Lawrence Collection, Photo album, Library and Archives Canada, accession number 1993-199 C 0492, box 2000586356.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Delta, 1973.

Wylie, Betty Jane. Reading Between the Lines: The Diaries of Women. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1995.

 

 

 

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AMY C. WALLACE

Amy Wallace is in her final year, completing an Honours Specialization in Visual Arts and a Major in Psychology. Next year, she will be pursuing a Masters in Art History and hopes to continue to explore the connections between art and local history.