Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter

Laura Goodman Salverson

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2023
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228018575
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Note
• Introduction to the Carleton Library Series Edition
• Author’s Preface (To book presently entitled Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter – suggested new title: Dragons In The Sky.)
• Chapter Numbers and Titles for book presently entitled Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter – new title
• 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