| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

*Sojourning Sisters: The Lives and Letters of Jessie and Annie McQueen.* By Jean Barman. (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2003. viii + 304 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $50.00; £32.00.)
It takes a canny historian to identify a provocative archival source, and a better one to use it well. This is what Jean Barman has done in Sojourning Sisters. Jessie and Annie McQueen were two Nova Scotian sisters who lived and worked in Canada's western-most province in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. They were also letter-writers par excellence—insightful, regular, and prolific. Barman uses the substantial archive created by their exchanges with each other and with kin in Nova Scotia as a window into the history of women, region, migration, and work in Canadian history.	1
Sojourning Sisters begins where the McQueen sisters did—nineteenth-century Pictou County, Nova Scotia. Barman argues that the McQueen family exemplified Pictou County's Scots, Presbyterian, literate, and agrarian character. It was their family's financial need that led sisters Jessie and Annie to migrate to British Columbia in search of better-paid work as school teachers in the late 1880s. In small settlements in the province's interior they found what Barman characterizes as a "frontier" society marked by Aboriginal presence, social mobility, the scarcity of settler women, and the fragility of the very things that defined the McQueen's Nova Scotia experience—religion, family, and "society."	. . .

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