Writing
Macphail wrote The Medical Services, Volume One of the Official History of the Canadian Forces in the Great War. His volume "appeared in 1925 and, as a result of its critical view of both the minister of militia and the surgeon general, caused a major controversy in political and military circles."
He wrote an essay on Canadian poet John McCrae, "An essay in character," for the 1919 edition of McCrae's In Flanders Fields And Other Poems.
Macphail was also a novelist. "The vine of Sibmah: a relation of the Puritans (1906) is a romantic novel set in the Restoration period. In 1921 he published the first translation of Louis Hémon's classic Maria Chapdelaine.
Macphail published four one-act plays — The land (1914), The last rising (1930), Company (1936), and The new house (1937) — "none of which were performed." The Land was "a loose adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, which MacPhail uses to critique market speculation ... class inequality, and what he saw as the disintegration of the family. His solution is a return to 'the land' and to a rural agrarian society."
His 1929 book, Three persons, "is made up of extended reviews of memoirs by three figures of the First World War, including T. E. Lawrence." The reviews were "a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, the London Mercury labelled the book 'the most devastating review published in the last hundred years.'"
Macphail was "throughout his career essentially an essayist, a literary role to which his strong personalitY was ideally suited." "Essays in puritanism (1905) is a series of biographical studies of literary and religious figures; Essays in politics (1909) is about contemporary political issues, particularly ... the imperial connection between Canada and Great Britain; Essays in fallacy (1910) offers lengthy polemical critiques of feminism, modern education, and modern theological trends."
Read more about this topic: Andrew Macphail
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“Romance reading and writing might be seen ... as a collectively elaborated female ritual through which women explore the consequences of their common social condition as the appendages of men and attempt to imagine a more perfect state where all the needs they so intensely feel and accept as given would be adequately addressed.”
—Janice A. Radway (b. 1949)
“It seems to me that since I’ve had children, I’ve grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”
—Anne Tyler (20th century)