Carleton Library

Laura Goodman Salverson's sensitive and finely wrought autobiography describes the struggles of a young immigrant woman to rise above an early life of poverty, isolation, and upheaval. A rare, first-person account of growing up different in Canada, Confessions of an lmmigrant's Daughter also depicts, sympathetically and graphically, the agonizing process of an immigrant community adjusting to life in a foreign place.

The lcelanders left their homeland to escape economie pressures and the threat of erupting volcanoes. Salverson, was born into the uprooted and transplanted community in Winnipeg in 1890. Following her father's wanderlust, the family travelled, in search of stability, to Minnesota, to the Dakotas, to Selkirk, Duluth, and ultimately to the Mississippi Valley in the deep south. His schemes unrealized, Lars Gudman brought his family back, time and again, to the security of the Winnipeg sweat shops. In recalling her father's wanderlust and her family's adventurers, Salverson documents a wide swath of early twentieth century history in the North American west. Against this nomadic background, Salverson tells of the trials of growing up, of the ostracism and condescension, of being 'hopelessly lcelandic.' But the story reflects also her indomitable inner spirit, which led to the discovery of libraries and the world of books and to the fulfilment of her dream to be a writer with the publication of her first novel The Viking Heart in 1924.

Confessions of an lmmigrant's Daughter, a major achievement in Canadian literature and Governor General's Award recipient in 1939 remains both a Canadian classic and an important social history on the experiences of women and immigrants.