For those interested in stories of how Victorian attitudes shaped Vancouver in the early 20th century, one need look no further than Ethel Wilson's The Innocent Traveller (1949), a series of remarkably-rendered linked portraits centred on Topaz Edgeworth, a middle-aged Aspergerian spinster who, along with her widowed older sister and her sister's spinster daughter, travel from the south of England after the death of their father and grandfather to live with the families of the older sister's sons.
There is much to object to in this largely ahistorical account (a book that tells us nothing of the world outside the Edgeworth family home), though sometimes it does us good to understand what ails us, and not simply hate it.
There is a nice passage near the middle of the book that shows how Topaz's sister and niece came to find -- and admit to -- an aesthetic that was not prescribed to them by a rigid world they were leaving behind. After travelling by ship from Liverpool to Montreal, the women board a train and, as it makes a brief stop in the Quebec countryside, they see a deep green meadow surrounded by a white fence, with a Roman Catholic church at its far end (they are devout Methodists) and brightly coloured houses to its sides.
"The scene upon which the mother and daughter looked had great beauty. They did not recognize it as great beauty because they had always acquiesced in what they saw, not distinguishing beauty unless it presented itself in familiar, obvious, and inescapable form; but there was something strange and odd and new in this scene which pleased them." (96)
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