Embracing Elsewhereness

Authorship in Canada during the nineteenth century was fundamentally transatlantic. Authors who resided in British North America, and later Canada, needed to navigate the system of trans-border publishing if they wished to see much in the way of financial compensation or wide readerships. While the material and legal conditions of trans-border publishing were a hindrance to many authors residing in Canada, some were able to negotiate these conditions to their advantage. One such author is May Agnes Fleming, a New Brunswick-born writer whose literary career was made possible through her pursuit of trans-border — and eventually transatlantic — publishing. In this article, I explore how Fleming’s accrual of mass-market, transatlantic readers and subsequent significant financial success was born by this period’s international copyright agreements. Using Fleming as a case study, this article encourages us to challenge our perceptions of nineteenth-century publishing conditions as exclusively an obstacle to authorship, instead making room for authors who cannily negotiated these conditions in an exceptional, intentional way.