Historian Dan Azoulay’s Hearts and Minds: Canadian Romance at the Dawn of the Modern Era, 1900–1930 is a welcome piece of scholarship that offers a fascinating look into Canadians’ love lives. In the era he writes about, when arranged marriages had mostly been discarded as relics of the patriarchal past, romantic courtship between two individuals was the breeding ground for marriage, making romance a serious business.
Hearts and Minds explores “four key aspects of romance”: what average Canadians sought in a marriage partner, the specific rules they were expected to follow during courtship, the obstacles and hardships they encountered along the way and the impact of World War One on their personal relationships.
Azoulay’s sources are “two magnificent collections of letters,” the most valuable the “Prim Rose at Home” column in the Family Herald and Weekly Star, a Montreal-based national magazine, and a widely distributed column in...
Elizabeth Abbott, senior research associate and former dean of women at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, is the author of several books, including A History of Marriage (Penguin, 2009), shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction.
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