The Canada’s Early Women Writers project is pleased to announce that their sister websites, Canada’s Early Women Writers and the Database of Canada’s Early Women Writers, are both fully populated and available online.

Canada’s Early Women Writers began in the pre-digital 1980s, with research using snail mail and typewriters; this now-static database is still available through the Simon Fraser University Library, but has been superseded by the updated CEWW housed within the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory.

With the development of the internet and its ever-expanding online resources, the project has augmented the original 471 authors of a book of poetry or fiction (such were the self-imposed limitations required in the pre-digital world) to include rich bio-bibliographic entries for over 730 early Canadian women writers. CEWW now includes notable Canadian English-language female writers who first published before 1950 in any format. Their audiences and genres range from travel journalism and scientific writing to the previously included poetry and fiction.

While CEWW offers extensive bio-bibliographic entries on a selection of early Canadian women writers for whom sufficient information can be found, the DoCEWW is a simpler, easily navigable database of all Canadian women writers who have been identified by our project. Built by the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at the Simon Fraser University library, DoCEWW records (as available) each author’s name, alternative names, dates and places of birth and death, places of residence, titles published, and collections and periodicals contributed to. While DoCEWW already contains some 4800 authors, the list is far from comprehensive, and the project invites the public to contribute new names, or additional information about the women who are already listed.

To contact Canada’s Early Women Writers, please submit a comment in the form on an individual page, or leave a comment on the project blog, specifying the author or title your comment refers to.  Director Carole Gerson and Project Manager Karyn Huenemann thank you for taking the time to check the project out!