Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter

Book excerpt: Born in Winnipeg to Icelandic immigrants in 1890, Laura Goodman Salverson embarked on a life marked by contradiction and cultural exchange. Her 1939 memoir braids the strands of her parents’ intellectual life in Iceland with a hardscrabble existence on the Prairies at the turn of the century, all against a backdrop of European settlement in post-Riel Manitoba and in colourful, self-assured prose. Leaving behind economic hardship, a difficult climate, and the threat of volcanoes, Lars Gudman was in search of stability for his family, but he was also ensnared by wanderlust. Travelling onward to Minnesota, the Dakotas, Selkirk, Duluth, and the Mississippi Valley, Salverson and her parents returned time and again to the Icelandic enclave in Winnipeg, a community struggling to adjust to life in Canada. In Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter Salverson makes real the political and cultural history of the twentieth-century North American west, even as she draws the reader into the inner life of a young girl growing up “hopelessly Icelandic” and finding refuge from discrimination and ostracism in the world of books. With a new introduction by Carl Watts situating the memoir and its prolific author in the literary canon, and reproducing Salverson’s original preface for the first time, Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter remains both a Canadian classic and an important social history of the experiences of women and immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century.