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Untempered Wind

Joanna E. Wood

Upon publication of “The Untempered Wind” in 1894, Joanna Wood quickly rose to international prominence, becoming in the next few years the most highly paid fiction-writer in Canada. In this novel, we find a detailed picture of village life. The narrative weaves through a variety of character types: the refined and the coarse, the humble and the self-righteous, the virtuous and the vicious. All these types are measured according to their treatment of Myron Holder, a young unwed mother — a “fallen woman” in the eyes of this “spiteful, narrow-minded village.” An early reviewer extolled Wood as Canada’s Charlotte Brontë, because of her sympathetic treatment of a disadvantaged woman trying to forge an independent life. An even more apt comparison might be to Thomas Hardy: like Hardy's characters, Myron is buffeted by cruel, relentless Fate — the “untempered wind” of the title. In “Silenced Sextet” (a 1993 study of once-popular Canadian women writers who subsequently dropped out of the public eye), Joanna Wood is seen as an important figure in the development of realism in Canadian literature: “No nineteenth-century writer better presents the sound, smell, and feel of day-to-day village life in this country.” - Summary by Bruce Pirie