Download or read book Marian and the Major written by Marian Engel and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rains, a former soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, immigrated to Canada at the same period as Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. He brought with him his wards, sisters Frances and Elizabeth. The three settled on St Joseph Island in northern Ontario, where their unusual domestic arrangement caught the attention and imagination of, among others, the nineteenth-century British travel-writer Anna Jameson, the Swiss born naturalist and explorer Louis Agassiz, the American poet William Cullen Bryant, and the Canadian novelist Marian Engel.