Isabel Huggan

In retrospect, a clue to what lay ahead occurred at the Orillia Public Library, when the helpful librarian went down to the basement stacks and brought up three books that, though long in the collection, had never been opened. Clearly, Henry James’s reputation for ornate prose had kept him unread for decades in this little Ontario town — home of Stephen…

When is a house not just a house? As a literary device, the house is often employed as an engine to drive a narrative or to generate a larger story outside its walls. Novels such as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, as well as memoirs like Plum Johnson’s They Left Us Everything and Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own…