Bessie Marchant’s Turn-of-the-Century Girls’ Adventure Fiction in Special Collections and at the Edge of Empire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I analyze the complexity of Bessie Marchant’s pro-imperial rhetoric in her girls’ adventure novels held in UVic’s Special Collections. Her early 20th-century girls’ adventure novels Daughters of the Dominion: A Story of the Canadian Frontier (1908), Juliette the Mail Carrier (1907), and A Heroine of the Sea (1904) are set in Canada and follow a formulaic plot: circumstances prompt a young female protagonist to take charge of a situation—nursing someone back to health, delivering the mail, or investigating a murder—before she ultimately marries. Marchant thus affords her female protagonists opportunities for action while simultaneously circumscribing them within marriage plots, expanding readers’ ideas of women’s sphere while also reinforcing middle-class domestic ideals. Set in Canada, Marchant’s novels offer both adventure and social mobility that England’s conventions around class, aristocracy, and gender did not. Marchant thereby expands possibilities for girls’ action by turning education, domestic responsibility, and family expansion into adventures on par with the dangerous physical tasks that heroines undertake as part of the main adventure plots.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".