The Heiress vs the Establishment

The Heiress vs the Establishment
Author: Constance Backhouse
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2005-01-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0774850736

In 1922, Elizabeth Bethune Campbell, a Toronto-born socialite, unearthed what she initially thought was an unsigned copy of her mother’s will, designating her as the primary beneficiary of the estate. The discovery snowballed into a fourteen-year-battle with the Ontario legal establishment, as Mrs. Campbell attempted to prove that her uncle, a prominent member of Ontario’s legal circle, had stolen funds from her mother’s estate. In 1930, she argued her case before the Law Lords of the Privy Council in London. A non-lawyer and Canadian, with no formal education or legal training, Campbell was the first woman to ever appear before them. She won. Reprinted here in its entirety, Campbell’s self-published account of her campaign, Where Angels Fear to Tread, is an eloquent first-person view of intrigue and overlapping spheres of influence in the early-twentieth-century legal system. Constance Backhouse and Nancy Backhouse provide extensive commentary and annotations to lluminate the context and pick up the narrative where Campbell’s book leaves off. Vibrantly written, this is an enthralling read. Not only a fascinating social and legal history, it’s also a very good story.

Acadiensis

Acadiensis
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2004
Genre: Atlantic Coast (Canada)
ISBN:

An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress and Other Stories

An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress and Other Stories
Author: Thomas Hardy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1999-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780192836854

'An Indiscretion in the Life of a Heiress', is one of ten stories - three collaborative, all uncollected - that are brought together in this volume. 'Indiscretion', derived from Hardy's unpublished first novel The Poor Man and the Lady, represents one of his earliest confrontations with theclass and gender issues which were to remain central to his fiction throughout his life. Several of the other stories, notably 'Destiny and a Blue Cloak', 'The Spectre of the Real', and 'The Unconquerable', raise similar questions, while at the same time illustrating, in typical Hardyan fashion,life's little (or somewhat larger) ironies. Some of the other stories are less characteristic: 'Old Mrs Chuncle', for example, approximates moral fable more closely than is usual for Hardy, while 'Our Exploits at West Poley' is anomalous not only in being (like 'The Thieves Who Couldn't Help Sneezing') a story written for children but alsoin experimenting with unreliable narration. Such stories are signifcant precisley because they incoporate varieties of technique, subject matter, and genre that are otherwise found in the Hardy canon either rarely or not at all.