| Main entry | McCully, Laura Elizabeth |
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| Birth place | Toronto |
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| Birth date | 17 March 1886 |
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| Death place | Toronto |
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| Death date | 8 July 1924 |
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| Identifier | 0212 |
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| Birth name | Laura Elizabeth McCully |
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| Marital status | single |
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| Degree and date | BA, University of Toronto (1907); MA, University of Toronto (1908) |
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| Paid work | journalist; worker in munitions factory |
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| Other work | speaker, women's suffrage |
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| Biography | Grandneice of the Honorable Jonathan McCully, a Father of Confederation, Laura McCully dedicated much of her life to extending the rights of self-governance to Canadian women. Her father was a prominent physician in Toronto, Laura's home for most of her short life. As she advanced through the Deer Park Public School and the Jarvis Street Collegiate Institute, her academic brilliance became evident; her literary gifts were also precociously revealed when, at the age of twelve, she won the MAIL AND EMPIRE'S first prize for a story in the ""Young People's Corner."" At the University of Toronto she earned first class BA and MA degrees and won a fellowship to Yale for 1909-10. She returned to Toronto to take up journalism on the SUNDAY WORLD and then the TORONTO NEWS, and also wrote advertising for the Robert Simpson department store. In advocating woman suffrage, she did not shrink from the notion of militancy; nor in her patriotic war service did she confine herself to passive support, chosing to enter a munitions factory. During the war, she also took up law at Osgoode Hall in 1916. In the midst of this feverish activity, she became seriously ill and did not recover her health. Her two volumes of poetry won fervent admiration from the Canadian literary establishment and the friendship of fellow poet Marjorie Pickthall*. |
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| Honours and awards | 1st place for a story and a poem, Young Peoples' Corner (MAIL AND EMPIRE, 1898) |
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| Residences | Toronto |
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| Geographic regions | Ontario |
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| Primary genres | poetry |
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| Books | MARY MAGDALENE AND OTHER POEMS (1914); BIRDS OF DAWN AND OTHER LYRICS (1919) |
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| Periodicals | HARPER'S BAZAAR; NEW YORK HERALD; SUNDAY WORLD; TORONTO NEWS; VARSITY |
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| Other publications | Anthologized in: Carman and Pierce, OUR CANADIAN LITERATURE (1934); Garvin, CANADIAN POETS (1916; 1926) |
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| Organizations | Canadian Authors Association, Canadian Society of Authors |
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| Father's name | Samuel Edward McCully |
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| Father's note | medical doctor |
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| Mother's name | Helen Fitzgibbon |
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| Biographical references | CANADIAN WHO WAS WHO, vol. 1 |
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| Bibliographic references | Watters, CHECKLIST OF CANADIAN LITERATURE...1620-1960 (1970), p. 121 |
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| Research references | complete |
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| Archival references | McCully family papers, Archives of Ontario |
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| Image credits | Image from John. W. Garvin, ed., CANADIAN POETS (2nd ed., Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1926). |
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| Copyright | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. Please cite Canada's Early Women Writers. SFU Library Digital Collections. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. 1980-2014. |
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