Finding Flora by Elinor Florence | The Miramichi Reader

There’s something about a homesteading novel I really enjoy – not because I think I could hack it as a homesteader, I definitely could not – but because there’s always such a practicality to the story. It’s unavoidable if you want to set your characters in setting where they’re stuck being subsistence farmers. I suspect there’s also a less rosy reason why I like them: I grew up in a settler state, and homesteading narratives are part of the larger sanitized narrative we like to tell ourselves about colonialism. Even when we’re working to shed the propaganda from an earlier era, we’re the sum of our experiences, right? Finding Flora by Elinor Florence attempts to handle this thorny problem. This is a homesteading novel, about a group of women who stake claims in Alberta, for various reasons, and Florence also uses their unusual stories to (lightly) explore some of the racism which played into the creation of European settlements in Canada.

Flora Craigie jumps from a train crossing the Prairies to get away from her new husband, who has proved himself an abuser and a liar. She left Scotland and her job as a lady’s companion to marry him, and is sorely disappointed so quickly. She doesn’t know exactly what she’s going to do, but she’s away from him and going to stay that way. Being cared for by a nurse who served in the Boer War, they talk about Flora’s goals and begin to shape a plan. The nurse sells her a scrip for two quarter-sections of land, and Flora sets up a homestead, with several other women on the sections around her; each of them seeking the freedom that hadn’t been afforded in their former lives, or the freedom that had been denied their forebears.

Finding Flora was a pleasant sort of read, especially since the ending was tied up nicely, and things worked out for Flora and the other female homesteaders, albeit after a lot of hardship.

This is a mostly-uplifting story about a woman overcoming the circumstances of her life, the sexism against her taking on homesteading, and her own ignorance of farming, and making something of it. Florence doesn’t shy away from the roughness of farming and homesteading, and the treatment that Flora and her friends get from the other homesteaders and business owners in their fledgling community is often fairly rough. One character, Jessie, is a Métis woman who managed to get this homestead after her father fought and fought to meet the requirements for him to get land. Through Jessie some of the broader issues of colonialism are explored, such as residential schools and the marginalization of the Métis in particular.

Finding Flora was a pleasant sort of read, especially since the ending was tied up nicely, and things worked out for Flora and the other female homesteaders, albeit after a lot of hardship. I would have enjoyed some deeper dives into a number of the issues Florence raised, but I also respect that the focus of the novel was on Flora and her work to carve out a small home for herself, finally. My preference would be for a grittier kind of homesteading novel, but I can’t deny that I wasn’t as satisfied as Flora was as she knocked out a new challenge in her years of homesteading.

Elinor Florence grew up on a Saskatchewan farm and earned degrees in English and journalism. She worked for newspapers in all four Western provinces, spent eight years writing for Reader’s Digest Canada, and even published her own award-winning community newspaper. Her first novel, Bird’s Eye View, was a national bestseller, while the second, Wildwood, was named one of Kobo’s Hundred Most Popular Canadian Books of All Time. Finding Flora was inspired by her own Scottish homesteading and Indigenous ancestors. She is a member of the Métis Nation of British Columbia and makes her home in the mountain resort of Invermere.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster (April 1 2025)
Paperback: 9″ x 6″ | 384 pp
ISBN: 9781668058916

Alison Manley

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Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.