Contributors

Professor Kirsten Shepherd-Barr 

Professor of English and Theatre Studies; Tutorial Fellow, St Catherine's, University of Oxford 

In 2018, my father, Gordon M. Shepherd, showed me for the first time some stories that had been published about a hundred years earlier by his grandmother, Fanny Shepherd, and I was stunned.  I had spent much of my career working on and uncovering neglected or little-known women writers from exactly that period, so to find one in my own family was startling. 

I began researching her work and her life, and was immediately struck by three elements of Fanny's story that make it stand out:  the unusually extensive documentation of the Shepherd family, who seemed to have a compulsion to write down their experiences in many forms; the fact that this compulsion to record their lives came from Fanny, who had prompted her own father to write his recollections of growing up in Victorian England and becoming a baker and publican; and the fact that they wrote their own histories despite having very limited educations (attending school until age 14).  Education becomes one of the strongest threads in the overall story of Fanny Shepherd and her development as a writer and activist on behalf of women in Canada.  I wanted to trace out that thread and the many others that make up Fanny's life, and to do so in an interactive and hypertextual way by creating a web site where people can browse the different elements that make up Fanny's life and work in the order they wish--a different way to experience life-writing.  

Dr Lauren Cullen

Research Assistant, Faculty of English, University of Oxford 

Being a settler-scholar from Canada, my interest in Fanny’s narrative is both professional and personal: my own family emigrated to Saskatchewan not far from the Shepherds. I come to this project as a settler scholar of Irish (Catholic), German (Black Sea Settler), and Greek-Macedonian descent. From different spaces and circumstances, my family emigrated to Canada – fleeing famine, religious persecution, and war. My great-grandparents left what is present-day Ukraine and became landholders (Treaty 7) with the help of early colonial homesteading policies. Despite their reception as outsiders with foreign tongues and mannerisms, these policies secured their status as farmers, landowners, and Canadian citizens due to the displacement of Indigenous peoples. This project has encouraged me to dig deeper into these legacies – to parse the unevenness of the homesteading policies themselves, as regards race, class, and creed. 

As we move through this project, we continue to come up against the contradictions that come with this period – of the ways in which women fought for their rights and while silencing others and that those fleeing conflict or seeking to secure a better future were granted land brutally taken from others. We acknowledge that engaging in this work requires the unsettling and improving of our own learnings, teachings, and approaches, and requires engagement with Indigenous-focused learning programs, resources, and practices. We look forward to learning more about this chapter of history, with the hopes that this project will showcase Fanny’s life as a pastiche of many different aspects a married entrepreneurial woman’s experience homesteading and writing in Saskatchewan.