The Prairie Wife
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Stringer, Arthur
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"The Prairie Wife" by Arthur Stringer is an epistolary novel written as a series of diary entries addressed to the narrator's friend Matilda Anne. The story follows Chaddie (nicknamed "Tabby" or "Gee-Gee"), a cultured young American woman who has lost her fortune when Chilean nitrate mine investments fail. After breaking off her engagement to Theobald Gustav, a German diplomat, she impulsively marries Duncan Argyll McKail ("Dinky-Dunk"), a Scottish-Canadian civil engineer turned wheat farmer, whom she met at Banff. The novel chronicles Chaddie's dramatic transition from a life of European travel, opera, and high society to the harsh realities of homesteading on the Canadian prairie. She moves to "Casa Grande," a tiny tin-covered shack on Duncan's ranch in the remote Northwest, where she must learn to cook, clean, make butter, tend chickens, and survive brutal blizzards with temperatures dropping to fifty degrees below zero. Through her witty, self-deprecating entries, Chaddie documents her struggles and triumphs: mastering domestic skills, shooting a hawk threatening her chickens, surviving encounters with an escaped murderer, weathering dangerous blizzards, and navigating the emotional challenges of her marriage. She befriends Percival Benson Woodhouse, an aristocratic English neighbor whose presence causes a jealous misunderstanding with Duncan on New Year's Eve. The couple faces financial pressures as Duncan risks everything on wheat farming, dreaming of future prosperity through modern farming techniques. Supporting characters include Olie, their devoted Swedish hired hand, and Olga Sarristo, a magnificent Finnish woman who helps with farm work. As the narrative progresses, Chaddie discovers she is pregnant, adding new dimensions to her prairie experience. Despite moments of loneliness, cultural deprivation, and marital tension, she gradually embraces her new life, finding unexpected fulfillment in the simple rhythms of frontier existence. The novel celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of love, while offering a vivid portrait of early twentieth-century homesteading life in the Canadian West.
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THE PRAIRIE WIFE
By ARTHUR STRINGER
THE PRAIRIE WIFE
Thursday the Nineteenth
Splash!... That's me, Matilda Anne! That's me falling plump into the pool of matrimony before I've had time to fall in love! And oh, Matilda Anne, Matilda Anne, I've got to talk to you! You may be six thousand miles away, but still you've got to be my safety-valve. I'd blow up and explode if I didn't express myself to some one. For it's so lonesome out here I could go and commune with the gophers. This isn't a twenty-part letter, my dear, and it isn't a diary. It's the coral ring I'm cutting my teeth of desolation on. For, every so long, I've simply got to sit down and talk to some one, or I'd go mad, clean, stark, staring mad, and bite the tops off the sweet-grass! It may even happen this will never be sent to you. But I like to think of you reading it, some day, page by page, when I'm fat and forty, or, what's more likely, when Duncan has me chained to a corral-post or finally shut up in a padded cell. For you were the one who was closest to me in the old days, Matilda Anne, and when I was in trouble you were always the staff on which I leaned, the calm-eyed Tillie-on-the-spot who never seemed to fail me! And I think you will understand.
But there's so much to talk about I scarcely know where to begin. The funny part of it all is, I've gone and married the Other Man. And you won't understand that a bit, unless I start at the beginning. But when I look back, there doesn't seem to be any beginning, for it's only in books that things really begin and end in a single lifetime.
Howsomever, as Chinkie used to say, when I left you and Scheming Jack in that funny little stone house of yours in Corfu, and got to Palermo, I found Lady Agatha and Chinkie there at the Hotel des Palmes and the yacht being coaled from a tramp steamer's bunkers in the harbor. So I went on with them to Monte Carlo. We had a terrible trip all the way up to the Riviera, and I was terribly sea-sick, and those lady novelists who love to get their heroines off on a private yacht never dream that in anything but duckpond weather the ordinary yacht at sea is about the meanest habitation between Heaven and earth. But it was at Monte Carlo I got the cable from Uncle Carlton telling me the Chilean revolution had wiped out our nitrate mine concessions and that your poor Tabby's last little nest-egg had been smashed....
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