Dr. S. Leigh Matthews is a Lecturer in the department of English and Modern Languages, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, British Columbia. She reads, researches and publishes mainly in the areas of Life Writing and Canadian Literature and has published a book titled Looking Back: Canadian Women´s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity (University of Calgary Press, 2010).

Hearing More Voices: English-Canadian Women in Print and on the Air, 1914-1960 analyzes the working lives and professional output of female Canadian broadcasters, authors of radio plays, novelists, humourists, historians, journalists, and poets who produced much of the middlebrow and modernist culture of the period. While some of these women have been well recognized, most have yet to receive due acknowledgement. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, Canadian women in the broadcasting and publishing industries faced material and evaluative repercussions from systemic discrimination in the law, in the cultural arena, and in the workplace. Repercussions included the suppression of their names from the literary canon and the devaluation of domestic themes in literature and the media. Readers of Hearing More Voices will discover how these female writers, broadcasters, and authors of radio drama, from all regions of Canada and from various cultural groups, developed entrepreneurial strategies to survive during challenging economic times and adapted to the changing cultural and political landscape of 1914 to 1960.

Evah McKowan´s novel, Janet of Kootenay: Life, Love, and Laughter in an Arcady of the West, provides a uniquely western Canadian perspective on many issues facing Canada at the start of the twentieth century, including the impact of World War One on the domestic front, the changing role of women in society, and the continuing process of land settlement. First published in 1919, Janet of Kootenay documents the efforts of Janet Kirk, a young and independent woman who moves from her own successful farm on the prairies to an eighty-acre parcel of land near Creston in the Kootenay region of British Columbia, to transform uncultivated land into a profitable enterprise while also finding her place within a small community in Canada´s westernmost province. Written as a series of letters to a friend, Janet of Kootenay provides an enthusiastic portrait of life in one small region of British Columbia at a time when very little was known about this truly "last best west." This new edition of McKowan´s novel includes a biographical and critical overview of her life and work in the Introduction, Explanatory Notes, early reviews of the first edition, select writings by McKowan, and a Works Cited and Consulted.