Flint and Feather: The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake [Hardcover]

Charlotte Gray brings her considerable biographical talent to bear on a worthy subject. As she goes through Johnson's life, year by year, liberally interspersing excerpts from poetry and letters along the way, she gives her readers a very real sense of the life that Johnson lived. Gray evokes the sensuousness of the places Johnson found herself in, rural and urban alike. She explores Johnson's complex, often strained family relationships. She delves into the mysteries surrounding the “Indian princess,” casting light on a few, putting forth the various theories on others, and speculating on what will forever remain unknowable, lost to the conflagration following her death to cancer. Gray also provides the crucial sociohistorical and political context: changing attitudes towards First Nations people and mixed marriages; the antislavery movement in the States; Victorian mores and attitudes toward women--in particular, women of the stage; the budding suffragette movement; allegiances formed with the First Nations people, and betrayed; and the importance of canoeing in the cultural life of the times, and for Johnson's own sense of well-being. Flint & Feather is not only a meticulously crafted work of scholarship, but a moving narrative that draws its readers in and propels them through Johnson's life with the same indomitable vivacity with which she lived it, right up to the end. --Diana Kuprel

Why does this exotic woman, the 19th-century daughter of a Mohawk chief and an English gentlewoman, continue to haunt and inform our collective imagination?

Charlotte Gray conjures up the magic and the myth of the poet and performer, breathing Technicolor life into one of Canada’s most exciting—and often misunderstood—historical figures. Pauline was a woman of many selves and identities both Mohawk and English: a native advocate who captivated white audiences in Canada, England and the United States; a lyric poet who performed vaudevillian skits; a New Woman who wrote for Mother’s Magazine; an incurable romantic who never married.

Finding that it is Pauline’s complex personality rather than her uneven literary reputation that travels across the years, Gray also delves into the poet’s tragic life. Who was the young man in the photo she kept in the locket she always wore? Why was she destined to end her life in poverty, her ashes buried at her favorite spot in Stanley Park after the largest funeral Vancouver had ever seen? Why did she become on her death a bestselling author?

Driven by a graceful, novel-like narrative that reveals new and insightful information about its subject, Flint & Feather also brings to life a rich portrait of post-Confederation Canada, a country struggling with its owndual identities. The most popular performer of her era, Pauline crossed the continent seventeen times and the Atlantic three times: she celebrated the growing maturity of her country while deploring the way that its native peoples were pushed aside.

Glowing with intelligence and empathy, Flint & Feather is a masterwork from one of our most esteemed biographers.