Home
For a piece called A Song of the Fraser River, Cicely Fox Smith (pronounced 'sigh-sli', as in precisely) is cited as one of twelve writers for British Columbia on a map devised by William Deacon in 1937. She wrote more than forty books, mainly on maritime subjects.
The daughter of a barrister, Cicely Fox Smith was born 1 February 1882, in Lymm, near Warrington, England, and published a collection of verse at age seventeen. Eager for adventure she sailed in 1911 on a steamship to Montreal, travelled by train to Lethbridge, Alberta, staying for about a year with her older brother Richard Andrew Smith. Continuing to British Columbia, where she stayed from 1912 to 1913, she lived in the James Bay neighbourhood of Victoria, working as a typist for the BC Lands Department and later for an attorney on the waterfront. She collected sailors' stories and jargon which led to her many books (mostly poetry) after she sailed in November of 1913, with her mother and sister, back to Liverpool aboard the White Star Line steamer Teutonic on the eve of World War I. Much of her poetry thereafter was written from the point of view of a sailor, so much so that readers often assumed she was masculine. Only after her reputation was made did she routinely publish under the names "Miss C. Fox Smith" or "Cicely Fox Smith," releasing 660 poems in total before her death in 1954.
She is rarely cited as a B.C. author.
[BCBW 2017]
The daughter of a barrister, Cicely Fox Smith was born 1 February 1882, in Lymm, near Warrington, England, and published a collection of verse at age seventeen. Eager for adventure she sailed in 1911 on a steamship to Montreal, travelled by train to Lethbridge, Alberta, staying for about a year with her older brother Richard Andrew Smith. Continuing to British Columbia, where she stayed from 1912 to 1913, she lived in the James Bay neighbourhood of Victoria, working as a typist for the BC Lands Department and later for an attorney on the waterfront. She collected sailors' stories and jargon which led to her many books (mostly poetry) after she sailed in November of 1913, with her mother and sister, back to Liverpool aboard the White Star Line steamer Teutonic on the eve of World War I. Much of her poetry thereafter was written from the point of view of a sailor, so much so that readers often assumed she was masculine. Only after her reputation was made did she routinely publish under the names "Miss C. Fox Smith" or "Cicely Fox Smith," releasing 660 poems in total before her death in 1954.
She is rarely cited as a B.C. author.
[BCBW 2017]
