Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter

A 1939 Governor General’s Award-winning memoir of growing up Icelandic in Canada. Laura Salverson’s autobiography describes a young immigrant woman’s rise above an early life of poverty, isolation, and upheaval. __Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter__ depicts, sympathetically and graphically, the agonizing process of an immigrant Icelandic community adjusting to life in a foreign place. "Born in Winnipeg to Icelandic immigrants in 1890, Laura Goodman Salverson embarked on a life marked by contradiction and cultural exchange. Her 1939 memoir braids the strands of her parents’ intellectual life in Iceland with a hardscrabble existence on the Prairies at the turn of the century, all against a backdrop of European settlement in post-Riel Manitoba and in colourful, self-assured prose. Leaving behind economic hardship, a difficult climate, and the threat of volcanoes, Lars Gudman was in search of stability for his family, but he was also ensnared by wanderlust. Travelling onward to Minnesota, the Dakotas, Selkirk, Duluth, and the Mississippi Valley, Salverson and her parents returned time and again to the Icelandic enclave in Winnipeg, a community struggling to adjust to life in Canada. In Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter Salverson makes real the political and cultural history of the twentieth-century North American west, even as she draws the reader into the inner life of a young girl growing up “hopelessly Icelandic” and finding refuge from discrimination and ostracism in the world of books. With a new introduction by Carl Watts situating the memoir and its prolific author in the literary canon, and reproducing Salverson’s original preface for the first time, Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter remains both a Canadian classic and an important social history of the experiences of women and immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century."-- Provided by publisher Cover Copyright Contents General Editor’s Note Introduction to the Carleton Library Series Edition Author’s Preface Manuscript Table of Contents Author’s Foreword Part One 1 The First Horizon 2 I Discover My Birthplace 3 Introducing Job’s Cycle 4 Humours of the Last Frontier 5 Treasured Portrait 6 I Meet the August Ancestors 7 Introduction to Exile 8 Exile 9 First Taste of the New World 10 Subjective Interlude 11 God’s Fields 12 Those Child Transgressions 13 Tales Strange and Varied 14 Vignettes of a Private World 15 Selkirk Interlude 16 False Security Part Two 17 The American Scene Opens 18 New Friends of Novel Fortune 19 The Scene Brightens 20 Fresh Misfortune 21 Solitary Christmas 22 The World Enlarges 23 Meeting Destiny Part Three 24 New Worlds to Conquer 25 Adolescent Conditioning 26 Tales Out of Time 27 I Discover Drama 28 Darker Reason 29 Again Green Pastures 30 Magic Moonlight 31 Deep Interval 32 Forced Decision 33 The North Once More 34 Trials of a Job Hunter 35 Readjustment and the Righteous Few 36 A Kitchen-View of Society 37 The Working World 38 And So Farewell 39 Back to the Canadian Scene 40 My Prairie Argosy 41 The Face of Virtue 42 I Settle in My Own Country 43 Homestead and Boarding-House 44 Birth of an Author 45 So Dreams Come True