McCandless, Clara (Thomas)

  • From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: See full biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Thomas_(academic)
  • Wiki profile notes:
    • Clara Thomas FRSC (née McCandless; May 22, 1919 – September 26, 2013) was a Canadian academic. A longtime professor of English at York University, she was one of the first academics to devote her work specifically to the study of Canadian literature, and was especially known for her studies of Canadian women writers such as Anna Brownell Jameson, Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, Isabella Valancy Crawford and Margaret Laurence.
    • After completing her master’s she published Canadian Novelists, a biographical dictionary of 150 Canadian writers, in 1946. She then applied to the University of Toronto to pursue her doctorate, but her application was declined because she was married; although she accepted the decision at the time, she reapplied a number of years later and was accepted. Her academic supervisor, Northrop Frye, supported her interest in Canadian literature and encouraged her to publish her thesis on Jameson. She completed her doctorate in 1962.
    • She joined the department of English at York University in 1961, the first woman ever hired as a faculty member by that department and only the second female academic hired by the entire university. When she and Eli Mandel introduced the university’s first dedicated Canadian literature course in 1969, interest was so high that within a week of the announcement and several weeks before registration for the course was even formally open, they had already received double the total number of registration requests that they had expected.
    • Her published work during her career at York included an essay on Moodie and Traill for the anthology The Clear Spirit; Ryerson of Upper Canada, a biography of Egerton Ryerson; The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence, a critical study of Laurence’s Manawaka sequence of novels; contributions to the omnibus Literary History of Canada; Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson; and William Arthur Deacon: A Canadian Literary Life, a biography of Deacon, coauthored with colleague John Lennox, which was a shortlisted finalist for the Toronto Book Awards in 1983.
  • Fifth Great Granddaughter of Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=3913
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/237188033/clara-mccandless-thomas