Reading for Information in St. Ursula's Convent, or The Nun of Canada

This essay situates the ‘first Canadian novel’, Julia Catherine Beckwith Hart's St. Ursula's Convent, or The Nun of Canada. Containing Scenes from Real Life (1824), within the context of the ‘convent tale’ genre popular in North America in the first half of the nineteenth century. While the novel has been largely dismissed by critics and readers for its apparently poor aesthetic qualities, Blair argues that the text offers a valuable reflection of the changing nature of information and communications at this time. Not only are social, national, and religious tensions implicated within in these shifts, but larger questions about governance — questions that were vital to this key colonial moment — come to be tabled in St. Ursula's Convent in such a way as to make Hart a unique and important voice within this broader political context.