Preface

And one day you will see that there are no answers, only the places we make.-Diana Evans, 26aThe places in which we live shape us and we, in turn, shape those places.How this happens, and to what ends, is the focus of this book.By exploring the life and writing of a singularly interesting character, writer Phebe Florence Miller, in the context of her historical and cultural location, twentieth-century Newfoundland and Labrador, it is possible to grasp some of the compelling and complex ways this reciprocal relationship operates.Phebe Florence Miller, poet and postmistress of Topsail, Conception Bay, was born in 1889.She lived in this small farming and fishing community, just 30 kilometres southwest of St. John's, now the provincial capital, for her entire life.Miller enjoyed a long literary career and achieved a measure of local fame in the 1920s and '30s with the publication of a book of her poetry.Yet in spite of all this, and her fascinating life, her work has received little attention since her death in 1979.This book, a study of Miller's writing and her writing life, is intended to rectify Miller's erasure from history.But more than that, it explores the multiple facets of Miller's identity as a Newfoundland 1 woman and poet, how this identity was structured by her place(s) in the world, and how her identity, in turn, affected the places of which she was a part.Thus the finished product is meant, as Helen Buss has phrased it, to "both deconstruct the traditional views of the female subject, and reconstruct female subjects from the anonymity of history" (2).As a female subject, Miller does not conform to "traditional views" of Newfoundland womanhood in the early twentieth century.There is a commonly mentioned, limited spectrum of Newfoundland womanhood that is bookended by the imagined stereotypes of the stalwart fisherman's wife and

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