Forgot your password?

• Book Reviews

Support Canada's History in other ways (more)

Despite its subtitle, I found Passing Through Missing Pages by Frances Welwood to be more of a remarkable story than an intriguing one. Annie Foster was a fiercely independent thinker and social activist who wore many mantles over her long life: university graduate, teacher, nurse, World War I veteran, young widow, council member, may¬oral candidate, writer, and twenty–year advocate for an imprisoned veteran.

Captivated by Welwood’s discovery that Foster was connected to a murder trial in 1926 but chose to omit that period from her own autobiography, Missing Pages, and loving a good mystery, I raced rather quickly through Foster’s early family, educational, and teaching years.

I lingered over her wartime activities, though, which included marrying Lieutenant Garland Foster, crossing over to England to be with him during his convalescence, joining the British Red Cross as a nurse (Canadian Nursing Services wouldn’t accept her because she was thirty–eight and married), and coping with the tragic loss of her husband just days prior to the 1918 armistice.

Throwing herself into civic work upon her return home, Foster became, as the local paper pronounced, the “First Lady Alderman” in Nelson, British Columbia. Her greatest achievement was quite possibly taking Nelson’s unpopular and financially floundering streetcar system and putting it back in the black — without raising the fare of a ticket.

That milestone comes three quarters of the way through Welwood’s book but not even midway through Foster’s life — she died in 1974 at ninety–nine years of age. in the last part of the book, the biography’s pace quickens, the murder trials come and go (not one trial but three), and Foster’s chapters as an advocate and a professional writer begin. Kudos to Welwood and her editor for leaving a final plot twist for readers to savour.