Review of \u3ci\u3eLooking Back: Canadian Women\u27s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity\u3c/i\u3e by S. Leigh Matthews

In Looking Back, Leigh Matthews, a literary scholar, argues that memoirs written by white, English-speaking women who settled in western Canadian prairie communities have been lost or ignored and have received little critical attention from both historians and literary critics. These published accounts of the Euro-Canadian prairie settlement project or homesteading project, terminology used throughout the book, allow Matthews to assess the Prairie Woman, the stereotypical image of the white, English-speaking female settler, against the more nuanced and diverse experiences of the prairie woman who actually migrated to the region. These memoirs, Matthews asserts, both confirm and challenge cultural images of the Prairie Woman. They also contest the masculine settlement narrative while at the same time remaining a part of the broader English colonialist narrative