About Canada’s Early Women Writers

The Database of Canada’s Early Women Writers (DoCEWW) at Simon Fraser University is associated with the larger Canada’s Early Women Writers (CEWW) project, which is part of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC). Both projects include women authors who either lived for an extensive period of time in Canada or self-identified as Canadian, and who published some form of writing in English—in any genre and in any forum—up to and including 1950.

Whereas CEWW offers extensive bio-bibliographic entries on a selection of early Canadian women writers for whom sufficient information can be found, the DoCEWW is a simpler, easily navigable database of all Canadian women writers who have been identified by our project.

Whenever the information is available, the DoCEWW records each author’s name, alternative names, dates and places of birth and death, residences, titles written, and collections and periodicals contributed to. While the DoCEWW already contains some 4500 authors, the list is not yet not comprehensive, and we invite the public to contribute new names, or additional information about the women we already have listed.

Acknowledgements

Directed by Dr. Carole Gerson, this project has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Simon Fraser University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Department of English, and the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at SFU. Substantial research has been done by Karyn Huenemann, Lindsey Bannister, Rebecca Baum, Nicholas Beauchesne, Rob Bittner, Deborah Blacklock, Leah de Roy, Brenna Duperron, Katie Gillespie, Alison McDonald, Linnea McNally, Daryn Wright, and Andrew Zuliani. We are grateful for the assistance of staff in SFU Inter-Library Loans: Nancy Blake, Sonny Wong, Elaine Shu, and Vera Yuen.