I was contacted the other day by Brooke-Lynn Andersson, an undergraduate at the University of Victoria, with a unique sort of question for us. A research assignment in her Children’s Literature course focuses on a particular text’s readership, rather than the text itself. Hunting through the shelves of Russell’s Books in Victoria, she found a copy of Elisabeth S. Colwell’s A Word Book for High Schools (1930), with the owner’s name written on the flyleaf: Beatrice Bunker.

So the question she posed to us was: could this Beatrice Bunker possibly be our Beatrice Bunker Rowley, a.k.a. the poet R. H. Grenville?

Luckily, as those of you who have followed our blog through the years will know, I have had the fortune to be in close touch with Beatrice Rowley’s family in a way that I am not connected to anyone else in our project. Serendipitous for Brooke-Lynn, as I have numerous samples of Bea’s handwriting that resemble the signature in the volume Brooke-Lynn is studying sufficiently to verify ownership. The collection of letters I have is better proof as a set, but you can see by the capitol “B” and the lower-case “r” here especially that he hand is the same, despite the years that have passed.

Brooke-Lynn has also sent along a couple of pages from the inside of the volume, showing the study notes Bea made as a girl, and an early sketch of a woman’s head. I have sketches and drawing she made later in life, as well: she continued to write and draw up until very late in life.

What are the chances, that a student looking to learn about the owner of an obscure high school text found in a used bookstore would be able to track down the biography of the owner, herself an author worth studying, and thus learn and be able to share more about Canadian readers, Canadian literature, Canadian women’s history… Thanks, Brooke-Lynn, for contacting us; this is why we do what we do.