Dr. Peggy Lynn Kelly holds a PhD in Canadian Literature from the University of Alberta (1999). She has published essays on Canadian women writers and broadcasters in Literary Encyclopedia Online, Atlantis, Cinema Canada, Canadian Poetry, Open Letter, Canadian Journal of Communication, Studies in Canadian Literature, Wider Boundaries of Daring, Anthologizing Canadian Literature and others. She is editor of the second edition of Shackles by Madge Macbeth. Dr. Kelly taught literature and communication at universities and colleges as a contract professor. Her interest in radio history surfaced during her first career as a television film/video editor and cross-media freelance journalist.

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.

    Macbeth´s fifth novel, Shackles, a pivotal work of early twentieth-century Canadian literature, recounts a vibrant period of first-wave feminism in Canada. First published in 1926, Shackles revovles around a middle-class Canadian woman, Naomi Lennox, and her search for acceptance and respect as a writer. Besides the protagonist´s struggle for the autonomy in which write Shackles portrays many of the major issues in Canadian public discourse of 1900-1930: the rise of the maternal feminist, the New Woman´s role in Canadian society, the conflict between free thinkers and the established churches, power relations in heterosexual unions, contradictions and tensions between domestic and public spaces, and appropriate roles for working- and middle-class women. This new edition of Madge Macbeth´s controversial novel includes an overview of her life and work in the Introduction, Explanatory Notes, a Bibliography, reviews of the first edition, and three key articles by Macbeth.