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Passionate Pen

By (author) Jill Downie

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A Victorian secret: the remarkable biography of one of our first ""lady"" journalists. She led a life of propriety, made even more so by the corseted Victorian age she inhabited. It was 1884 in Toronto and Alice Freeman was a seemingly ordinary, unmarried and genteel school teacher living with her brother....Until family archives were opened just recently, almost no one knew that she had led an astonishing secret double life: Alice Freeman was also ""Faith Fenton, "" one of Canada's first and most popular female columnists -- and an early crusader for women's rights. In re-creating the life and times of a passionate, independent thinker, a ""lady"" journalist well ahead of her time, biographer Jill Downie explores a society in the throes of social change. Faith Fenton was the first female journalist to visit and write about conditions in a woman's penitentiary; she interviewed Susan B. Anthony and leaders of the Suffragist Movement; she went undercover to investigate the life of the poor and destitute; she was friends with Wilfrid Laurier and Sir John A. Macdonald; and at the height of the Gold Rush, she trekked the notorious Teslin Trail to reach Dawson City. A truly absorbing portrait of a woman who, even after her death, remained an enigma, ""A Passionate Pen"" is a biography that is both a romance and a mystery, rich in character and the texture of turn-of-the-century Canada.