'Ladies in retirement': The women of the Toronto Heliconian Club (Ontario, Jessie Alexander Roberts, Lorna Sheard, Mona Coxwell, Jean Blewett, Virna Sheard, Katherine Hale)

This thesis explores the cultural contributions of the Toronto Heliconian Club which, while little known today, functioned as a major cultural institution for women in the arts in the first half of the last century. Using a variety of archives including those at the University of Toronto, Queen's University, the Archives of Ontario, the Women's Art Association and the Toronto Reference Library, my study aims to recover women's contributions to the shaping of Canada's intellectual and cultural history.; In Chapter One I consider the Heliconian Club as a promoter of the arts. Looking in detail at specific events held at the Club including private functions as well as large-scale public events, I will discuss and explore Heliconian moments of a culturally transformative nature, including public activism and war efforts. Chapter Two emphasizes Heliconians and the theatre. Beginning with a discussion of Heliconian Hall as a theatre in its own right, this chapter explores the collaborative and innovative quality of Heliconian productions and looks at the specific dramatic activity of Jessie Alexander Roberts, Lorna Sheard and Mona Coxwell both within the club and as part of their larger contributions to Canada's drama community. My final chapter will consider how the work of Heliconian authors Jean Blewett, Virna Sheard and Katherine Hale employed sentimentalism as a form of literary power at the advent of Canadian literary modernism. Although a modernist perversion of the sentimental enacted an adversarial relationship to feminized and/or domestic narratives and saw the rise of modernism as a severing of literary history, exploring the lives of these women helps to discover links between an avant garde modernist aesthetic and a feminine literary past.; While most Heliconians are unknown in present day literary scholarship, my thesis reveals them to be publicly acclaimed and prominent individual artists whose formative networks bridged social, economic, political, geographical and multi-generational diversities. As literary innovators, Heliconians redefined their place in intellectual history, taking ownership of their own means of intellectual production while they "process[ed] new concepts of nationhood, economy, gender and professionalism" (Ruggles Gere, 4).