Doctoral candidate Sarah Dorward has just published “Embracing ‘Elsewhereness’: May Agnes Fleming and Late Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Authorship” in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada. Arguing that authorship in Canada during the nineteenth century was fundamentally transatlantic, Sarah shows that authors who resided in British North America, and later Canada, needed to navigate the system of trans-border publishing if they wished to see much in the way of financial compensation or wide readerships. While the material and legal conditions of trans-border publishing were a hindrance to many authors residing in Canada, some were able to negotiate these conditions to their advantage.
Focusing on the career of May Agnes Fleming, a New Brunswick-born writer whose literary career was made possible through her pursuit of trans-border —and eventually transatlantic —publishing, Sarah explores how Fleming’s accrual of mass-market, transatlantic readers and subsequent significant financial success was enabled by this period’s international copyright agreements.
May Agnes Fleming. Sybil Campbell; or, The Queen of the Isle. A Romance of the Coast. November 1, 1869. Wikimedia Commons.