Aleta Dey
  • Publication Date: October 18, 2000
  • ISBN: 9781551113913 / 1551113910
  • 194 pages; 5¼" x 8½"

Broadview eBooks are available on a variety of platforms. To learn more, please visit our eBook information page.

Note on pricing.

Request Exam Copy

Examination copy policy

Availability: Worldwide

Aleta Dey

  • Publication Date: October 18, 2000
  • ISBN: 9781551113913 / 1551113910
  • 194 pages; 5¼" x 8½"

Francis Marion Beynon’s autobiographical novel Aleta Dey is increasingly recognised as a small classic of early twentieth-century fiction. Beynon was a journalist and feminist much involved in public affairs in early twentieth-century Manitoba. In 1917, aged 33, she was forced to leave her job as a result of her open pacifism, and she soon moved to New York where she dropped out of the public eye. Aleta Dey, first published in 1919, tells in plain and affecting prose the story of a girl growing up in Manitoba, becoming politically conscious, and falling in love with McNair, a man of much more conventional views. The First World War brings a crisis for them both after McNair enlists as a soldier.

Though Beynon was a Canadian, her spare, emotionally open prose may have less in common with that of other Canadian writers of the time than it does with the style of contemporaneous western American women writers such as Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Like Cather’s My Antonia, Beynon’s Aleta Dey resonates with prairie simplicity, passion, and strength.

  1. A COWARD
  2. BABY BROTHER
  3. GOD IN THE STORM
  4. LIGHTNING
  5. SCHOOL IN TOWN
  6. PUNISHMENT
  7. THE SPIRITUAL X-RAY
  8. NED IS EXPELLED
  9. THE STORM WIND AGAIN
  10. AGNOSTICISM
  11. McNAIR
  12. A TILT ABOUT SOCIALISM
  13. A VISITOR
  14. NED AGAIN
  15. COLIN REFUSES TO COME
  16. WOOING COLIN
  17. THE QUARREL
  18. A DISCOVERY
  19. A POOR FIGHTER
  20. PAULINE INTERVENES
  21. THE CHURCH
  22. THE BROKEN SPELL
  23. McNAIR’S STORY
  24. WAR
  25. THEN IT CAME HOME
  26. NED IN DIFFICULTIES
  27. COLIN IN A FURY
  28. FAREWELL
  29. WAR PROFITEERS AND SOLDIERS
  30. SOCIALISM OR CHRISTIANITY
  31. McNAIR’S LETTERS
  32. TWO TELEGRAMS
  33. THE STRUGGLE
  34. GETHSEMANE
  35. OUT OF JAIL
  36. AFTER AN INTERLUDE
  37. McNAIR GIVES WAY
  38. THE FUNERAL
  39. McNAIR PASSES ON