58 pages • 1 hour read
Morley CallaghanAll the Years of Her Life
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1936A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Literary Context: 19th-Century Canadian Literature
Canada became an independent nation in 1867 and, with several of its earlier writers registering both European and American influence, was still in the process of establishing its own literary voice at the turn of the 20th century. It was not until the 1940s that Canadian literature became more distinctive in its style, themes, and characterizations. Prior to 1920, much Canadian literature focused on nature, taking the form of pastoral romances and realist tales of life in the wild. Many of these works stylistically resonated with the fiction of American writer James Fennimore Cooper, who is well known for his unique brand of 19th-century pastoralism. By the time Callaghan broke onto the literary scene in the late 1920s, many fellow writers and critics agreed that his work ushered in a welcome new era in Canadian letters.
Because Canada was still finding its authorial voice and style in Callaghan’s time, relatively few Canadian fiction writers from the first decades of the 20th century have retained distinction into the 21st century. However, Callaghan was not the only Canadian writer to reach a wide readership during this time. Additional writers of note from the 1920s and 1930s include Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947), who was known for fiction influenced by European writers like Flaubert and de Maupassant; Callaghan’s contemporary, Raymond Knister (1899-1932), who was noted for his incisive realism; and another contemporary by the name of Hugh MacLennan (1907-1990) who, like Callaghan, identified his fiction with the Modernist movement.
Historical Context: The Great Depression
Callaghan’s fiction appeared in the New Yorker between 1928 and 1938, intersecting with the onset of the Great Depression in North America—a massive economic event that would impact much of the world. Yet, at this fraught historical moment, Callaghan would find that publishing in the United States nevertheless came with fewer difficulties and artistic negotiations than publishing in Canada. Even as he sought to publish with such urbane and cosmopolitan magazines as the New Yorker (which had been criticized for overlooking the Great Depression in much of its content) Callaghan’s stories found a solid outlet there through much of the 1930s (Yagoda, Ben. About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. New York, Scribner, 2000, p. 13).
At the time Callaghan published with the magazine, the New Yorker had a reputation for heavily editing authors’ submissions so essays and stories would accommodate the New York settings and themes that its readers had come to expect. In “All the Years of Her Life,” for example, Callaghan’s narrator makes brief reference to Alfred and his mother walking home and “passing under the Sixth Avenue elevation” (18). While this could place the story in New York City, this detail can just as easily apply to numerous North American urban settings. Thus, while Callaghan’s relationship with the magazine was as much economic as it was artistic, its editorial tendency to reframe writers’ work did not seem to affect most of Callaghan’s stories. This writer’s fiction was both a good fit for the magazine and composed in a style that highlighted human compassion, benevolence, and a sense of rational order; these were important, hope-inducing themes for readers during the Great Depression.
