Esther Clark Wright and Recent Themes in Historiography

Abstract

I FIRST “MET” ESTHER CLARK WRIGHT WHEN SHE WAS A STUDENT at Acadia, and by reading her love letters. During the two years that I worked as an archival assistant in the Esther Clark Wright Archives, 1995-1996, her voluminous papers were being sorted on long rows of shelving, and I had occasion to look for class photos or to read letters from Conrad that, at least in my memory, all began with, “My Dear Girl.” We in the archives spoke of “Esther” with the fondness born of daily acquaintance. However, my topic here is endnotes rather than love notes, and historiography rather than class photographs. I have been asked to share a few comments on the ongoing relevance of Esther Clark Wright’s work from the perspective of my doctoral research on religious communities in Planter and Loyalist Nova Scotia. I am sure I am not the only researcher who has dog-eared the endnotes section of Wright’s books. Many of us have benefitted from her diligent work in the archives, sliding our fingers down the page with an eye to locating good sources for our own research projects. I suspect that it’s during the research stage of our work that many of us are grateful for Wright’s books, even if we make use of the archival sources for quite different projects than her own. We are perhaps less likely to ask Wright to help us with the interpretive or historiographic aspects of our writing. I did a very selective survey of books on Loyalists, looking for Wright in the notes or index. You will probably not be surprised to know that it was mostly historians of (and from) this region who cited Wright, while her books were mostly absent from broader and more recent studies. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest a few ways that aspects of Wright’s work continue to resonate with several themes in subsequent historiography. I will organize my remarks around four themes: Planters, Loyalists, lived religion, and bodies of water.