The Brideship by Joan Weir ~ 1998. This edition: Stoddart, 1998. Paperback. ISBN: 0-7736-7474-8. 218 pages.

My rating: 4.5/10. This one gets a “just missed” from me. It was marred by a seemingly unlikely but at the same time groaningly predictable plot, and a selection of overly stereotyped characters.

I initially questioned the historical accuracy, which didn’t quite ring true to me: a group of teenage girls is apparently sent by the Anglican Church to be prospective brides in the female-starved British Columbia and Vancouver Island colonies in the 1860s. This was indeed correct; I obviously do not know quite as much B.C. history as I like to think I do!

The writing is competent enough but the whole package didn’t do much for me. Some teens may find this an acceptable read, but I would hesitate to recommend it, except for its dramatic focus on a little-known chapter of British Columbia and Cariboo Gold Rush history.

*****

Fifteen-year-old Sarah is an orphan in England in 1862. Uncooperative and outspoken, she is a disruptive presence in the orphanage where she has ended up after the death of her parents and then her uncle, so is recommended with great relief by the orphanage head to join a group of teenage girls who are being sent to the western Canadian gold fields as prospective brides for the miners. This arbitrary emigration is presided over by a (hopefully atypical!) prospective Anglican Church minister, the sinister and vicious Mr. Dubonnet. Sarah’s frail older cousin Maud is also part of the group, as are a number of the usual variety of orphans in this type of fiction, including Lizzie, the cockney ex-pickpocket with a heart of gold, and Arabella, the mean-spirited snooty beauty.

Sarah makes the trip in fine fettle, despite continual run-ins with Mr. Dubonnet and various adventures on board. Poor Maud makes it only as far as the Falkland Islands, before succumbing to her constant cough, as we’ve expected from very early on in the narrative – the girl very obviously has the cloud of doom hanging over her right from the first chapter, with her meek disposition and delicate consitution. The surviving orphans weather the rest of the voyage, which is marked with melodramatic incidents to keep things interesting. They eventually arrive at Vancouver Island, are off-loaded at Esquimalt, and are then shipped up the Cariboo Road to Barkerville.

Sarah refuses to accept her prospective husband, and teams up with Lizzie to start an enterprise of her own as a laundress. Justice in the form of Judge Begbie nails Mr. Dubonnet, true love arrives for Lizzie and Sarah, and everything is looking up as we close the last page.

I was curious as to the verity of the “bride ship” angle, so I did a bit of research, and found that the author did base this tale on true events. See Victoria History – the British Columbia Emigration Society, for a brief discussion.

I’ve included several articles from other sources to balance my not terribly enthusiastic review. The Brideship isn’t a bad book, but compared to other similar works in the genre it is on the lower end of the spectrum, in my one-person’s opinion.

I’ve just been reading Marianne Brandis’ stellar 1830s’ Ontario trilogy of The Tinderbox, The Quarter-Pie Window, and The Sign of the Scales (reviews pending), as well as Suzanne Martel’s The King’s Daughter, following a French fille du roy sailing to Canada from France among a similar shipment of “brides to be” in the 1600s. These other books stand head and shoulders above Weir’s Brideship, at least for this reader, reading like properly engaging novels which just happen to be set in historically important and interesting times versus a packaged up collection of “teachable moments” clothed in stereotype and unlikely melodrama.

*****

In a University of Manitoba author profile, Kamloops, B.C. writer and retired college creative writing instructor Joan Weir talks about some aspects of the process of writing The Brideship.

“Usually when I start, I feel very strongly that, when the whole thing is over, I want to have made some sort of comment that is worth making. (I)n Brideship, I wanted very much to get across the idea for modern kids that, no matter where you find yourself, life’s an adventure and you’ve got to seize the moment and take it and go with and make something out of it… I start with that, and from there I go to character, but I have to know ‘why’ I’m writing the book before I start. I don’t know the ending. I think the ending has to grow out of what happens as your characters suddenly take on a life of their own which is greater than you thought when you started. It’s out of their growth that the ending grows, and very often the ending isn’t what you thought, even in a sort of vague way, that it was going to be at all. It surprised me very much what happened to Lizzie in Brideship. Lizzie becomes almost the strongest character in the book, something I didn’t intend at all when I started. I thought she was going to be very much a secondary character. So many readers, when they talk about Brideship, say, ‘Oh, I really liked Lizzie.’

“In the actual historical story of those girls who came over on the Tynemouth, one girl did die, and I felt committed to put that in because I felt so badly about that poor little orphan, Elizabeth Buchanan, who was buried at sea. Sarah’s cousin, Maud, in Brideship is patterned on Elizabeth. I didn’t dare use Elizabeth’s name because this is fiction, and I didn’t want to get involved in ‘this is true and this isn’t true,’ for Elizabeth didn’t have a cousin with her or someone back in England to marry, as my Maud character does. The Anglican Church organized and sent over three boatloads of girls from orphanages, but the first trip is the only one that there was any sort of information about at all. The conditions were absolutely like I’ve described them in the book. I’ve got an artist’s sketch of the ship which was drawn from pictures on file in the museum. It was a tiny little craft that had over 300 people on it. The girls really were housed down below in the hold compartment with only these little tiny portholes.

“The book’s cover was interesting because often publishers don’t give authors any input at all on covers. Kathryn Cole was wonderful because she sent me sketches of what they wanted to do with the cover which was a picture of Lizzie and Sarah dolled up in Mrs. Worthing’s clothes, with parasols and fancy hats, smiling and tripping around the ship’s deck. When Kathryn asked, ‘What do you think of it?’ I replied, ‘We’ll, it’s a very pretty picture, but I’m afraid that it sets the wrong tone for the book. When you look at it, you’ll think it was a happy journey, and it wasn’t.'” Kathryn then asked Joan for her cover ideas. “‘I would like a picture of Sarah below decks in the storage compartment in which they’re living, looking out that one little porthole. And, if possible I’d like her holding her doll.’ Even though that detail makes Sarah look younger than she is, that doll was the only thing that she owned. I was delighted because the artist did exactly what I wanted. The cover sets the tone, and it was not a happy trip. But, if you’d have had the title Brideship and these girls on the original cover dancing around, you would have thought it was like a Love Boat.“

And here is an edited excerpt from the CanLit.ca review of The Brideship.

Four dozen orphans, some of them as young as sixteen, are sent off to the West Coast of Canada on the vague promise that they will find work there. Sarah eagerly volunteers to go; she will do anything to get out of the hated orphanage. An Anglican clergyman has organized the emigration, and this fact alone seems to guarantee that the promised positions will materialize, and that the four dozen girls are in good hands.

Appearances, however, deceive. A few days before their arrival in Canada, the girls find out that “there aren’t as many jobs available” as had originally been thought, and that they are to be “brides instead.” The clergyman, too, is not what he seems: aside from being responsible for deceiving the girls, he is also a thief. He triumphs in the short run, but his dishonesty eventually catches up with him. Sarah, however, never gets to meet the man intended for her. She escapes to Barkerville, sets up a laundry business there, and falls in love with someone she chooses for herself.

The Brideship concentrates more on action than on emotion. Sarah gets somewhat pushed into the background by the question of whether the Anglican Church really did organize shiploads of female orphans under the pretense of getting them positions as governesses, then offering them as brides to the miners working in British Columbia instead. And if, as Weir contends, the answer is “yes,” then one wonders why the author neglects to show some outrage in at least one of the unfortunate “brides.” Not even the heroine expresses any offense at such a monumental deception; she is worried that the husband the clergyman has chosen for her might be a brute, but it does not seem to enter her mind that the clergyman had no right to choose a husband for her in the first place. Although The Brideship has a lot of action, it is short on psychological realism.