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Fiction Classics

The Yellow Briar

A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside

by (author) Patrick Slater

introduction by Michael Gnarowski

Publisher
Dundurn Press
Initial publish date
Jul 2009
Category
Classics, General, General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781550028485
    Publish Date
    Jul 2009
    List Price
    $18.99
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781770705999
    Publish Date
    Jul 2009
    List Price
    $9.99

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Description

Folktale, memoir, fiction, literary hoax, The Yellow Briar is all of these. Ostensibly the charming remembrance of an Irish orphan who escapes the Great Famine of 1840s Ireland and comes to the New World to seek a fresh start on the streets of Toronto and in the pioneer hinterland of Canada West (Ontario), the book was actually a fictional humbug perpetrated by John Mitchell, a Toronto lawyer, who first published the tale in 1933.

Patrick Slater, the protagonist of the "memoir," is said to have died in 1924 but not before setting his saga down on paper. And what an account it is! The Globe and Mail felt that the book "gives a picture of Ontario to be found in no other work of fiction we know and has won for itself a permanent place in Canadian literature." If nothing else, Slater/Mitchell captures perfectly the lilt of the Irish and the wry wisdom of an old soul to paint an affecting portrait of trials and tribulations in a long-ago time.

About the authors

Patrick Slater was the pseudonym of John Mitchell (1880-1951), a Toronto lawyer.

Patrick Slater's profile page

Michael Gnarowski co-edited The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, compiled The Concise Bibliography of E nglish Canadian Literature, and edited the Critical Views on Canadian Writers Series for McGraw-Hill Ryerson. He has written for Encyclopedia Americana, The Canadian Encyclopedia, The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography, and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Gnarowski is professor emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Michael Gnarowski's profile page

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The Voyageur Classic Canadian Fiction 7-Book Bundle

All Else Is Folly / Pauline Johnson / The Town Below / Self Condemned / Storm Below / The Yellow Briar / Maria Chapdelaine

by (author) Peregrine Acland, Pauline Johnson, Roger Lemelin, Hugh Garner, Patrick Slater, Louis Hemon & Wyndham Lewis
foreword by Ford Madox Ford
introduction by Brian Busby, Michael Gnarowski, Paul Stuewe & Allan Pero
translated by W.H. Blake

The Voyageur Canadian Essays & Criticism 2-Book Bundle

Selected Writings, A.J.M. Smith / The Kindred of the Wild

by (author) A.J.M. Smith & Charles G.D. Roberts
introduction by Michael Gnarowski & James Polk

The Voyageur Canadian Biographies 5-Book Bundle

The Firebrand / Mrs. Simcoe's Diary / The Scalpel, the Sword / The Men of the Last Frontier / Pilgrims of the Wild

by (author) Grey Owl, Sydney Gordon, Mary Quayle Innis, Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe & William Kilbourn
introduction by James Polk, Michael Gnarowski, Julie Allan, Norman Bethune Allan, Susan Ostrovsky & Ronald Stagg
foreword by Hugh Eayrs