Author Reading/Book Launch

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Saturday, November 23rd, 2019
2:00 PM to 4:00 PM

Helen Webster will read from the third novel in her Canadian Historical Trilogy,, COMPANY WIFE, the story of Maggie McLeod Ross Mackenzie. Born in1850 in the Saguenay in Quebec, to a wealthy Hudsons Bay Company family, her life changed dramatically when she was 15 and her family lost its wealth.She let go of her own dreams and at 17 entered into an arranged marriage to an HBC trader. By age 24 she and her five children, the youngest a baby of three months, endured an arduous trek of a thousand miles into the wilderness of northern Ontario, following her husband to his new posting near what today is Sudbury, Ontario. For almost two decades she lived in isolation in a tiny cabin in the vast loneliness of the north woods where she bore five more children and fulfilled the role of a company wife. Maggie was forced to endure the humiliation and insult of her husband's countless liaisons with other women. Over the years of her marriage her husband, already a domineering man, became physically abusive to the point that she began to fear for her life and those of her children. In an era when divorce was unheard of, what could she do, how could she survive?