Alice Boissonneau

Alice Irene Boissonneau, née Eedy (1918 - 2007) was a Canadian writer and social worker.^[1] She was most noted for her 1976 novel Eileen McCullough, which was a shortlisted finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1977.^[2]

Background

Born in Walkerton, Ontario,^[3] and raised in St. Mary's, Ontario, she was the daughter of Lorne Eedy, a publisher of the St. Mary's Journal-Argus.^[4] Her older sister, Helen Elizabeth Eedy, was the wife of politician James Elisha Brown,^[5] and later remarried to Northrop Frye in 1988 after Brown's death.^[6]

She was educated at the University of Toronto's Victoria College, and began her career as a hospital social worker in Toronto,^[7] also serving on Toronto's municipal housing committee in the 1940s.^[8]

Career

After marrying forestry worker Arthur Boissonneau, she took up writing, with her short stories and poetry appearing in various Canadian literary magazines, and radio dramas broadcast by CBC Radio,^[9] prior to the publication of Eileen McCullogh in 1976.^[10] The novel's titular character was a young woman in Toronto in the World War II era who found herself a single mother after a brief affair with a soldier and was forced to take low-paying working class jobs to support herself and her child.^[11]

She published There Will Be Gardens, a memoir of her time in Toronto in the 1940s, in 1992,^[12] and followed up with her second and final novel, A Sudden Brightness, in 1994.^[3]

In late life she lived in Guelph, Ontario, where she died in 2007.^[13] Following her death, her neighbour Marlene Santin established a charitable program, Pets for Alice, in her memory to help cover the costs of pet adoption and care for senior citizens.^[14]