Who was Elizabeth Simcoe?
- kmabel6
- Sep 16
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 17
Most Canadians know the Simcoe name – if only as a place on a map. Far fewer know about the people behind the name. And many might ask why we should care about someone who lived two hundred years ago in a world that seems totally foreign to us now? We live in a time of turmoil and anxiety on a global scale. How could the life of a privileged Englishwoman in the long eighteenth century possibly matter?
In fact, there are remarkable similarities between her lived experiences and ours. We both find ourselves in a world in which people are struggling to come to terms with political, technological, economic, and social upheaval. Fundamental changes to the systems that are the foundations for our everyday lives are requiring us to make decisions about the kind of world we want and what (if anything) we as individuals can do about it. Mrs. Simcoe may not be a well-known historical figure, but her long life intersected with all the major currents of her day. By examining her life and her choices, we have a glimpse into how others have attempted to deal with change.
Elizabeth Simcoe was born in England in 1762 during an intercontinental war that affected her both directly (in the death of her father before she was born) and indirectly (in laying the foundations of an empire that would shape her life). She died in 1850, having witnessed the remaking of her world through a series of revolutions (American, French, industrial, agricultural, and scientific) and wars (Seven Years, Napoleonic, and 1812). She watched the spread of new religious, social, and political values. She participated in the struggle over women’s place in it all. And she played a significant, if invisible, role in creating the country that would become Canada. Her life story offers us an opportunity to examine and re-examine what we thought we knew about that rich history.
Mrs. Simcoe: A Life in the Age of Revolutions follows the amazing story of her life, exploring how she lived it in the context of all these changes. The book also explores her uncanny ability to meet and interact with many men and women well known to history. Her story includes William Wilberforce and the anti-slavery movement; the Bluestockings of London and Bath; literary luminaries from Fanny Burney to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Lord Byron; religious leaders of the Evangelical movement; men who laid the foundations of science in geology and electricity; and artists such as J.M.W. Turner who left us a visual record of how they saw their world.
Of course, it also includes the man she married: John Graves Simcoe (1752-1806), the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada and a fascinating and complex figure in his own right.
Elizabeth Simcoe first came to the attention of Canadians in 1911, when Toronto newspaperman John Ross Robertson published what he called her “diary”: an account of her life in Upper Canada between 1792 and 1796. He had travelled to England looking for materials on the early history of Ontario, apparently hoping to write a biography of John Graves Simcoe who was then little known in Canada. Much to his surprise, he discovered Simcoe’s wife and a treasure trove of sketches, watercolours, and correspondence. For him, the materials represented a record of life in the “pioneer” days of the province: a refreshing change from the dry, constitutional accounts that filled the history books of his day.
His volume was reprinted for Toronto’s centennial celebrations in 1934 and again for Canada’s centennial as part of a Coles historical reprint series. A second version of the diary was published in 1965 by Mary Quayle Innis (once dean of women at University College,
Toronto).
And so, for those who know Elizabeth Simcoe’s name, it has been forever associated with “the diary” and her visual record of early settler-society in central Canada.
Of course, Mrs. Simcoe has not been entirely ignored in Canadian writing, particularly after social history became an important sub-genre in the 1970s. She began to appear as a bit character in pre-Confederation histories and in biographies such as Marcus Van Steen’s Governor Simcoe and His Lady (Hodder and Stoughton, 1968). More recently, she appears as a representative of “curiosity” in Margaret MacMillan’s History’s People (Anansi, 2015). She has been the subject of one full-length biography: Mary Beacock Fryer’s Elizabeth Postuma [sic] Simcoe (Dundurn, 1984).
Clearly, though, there is much more that can be said – both about Elizabeth Simcoe’s life and the uses to which her record of Upper Canada has been put. In this blog, I will explore some of those aspects of her life, past and present, and dip into the many stories that couldn’t fit into the book. I will also consider some of the controversies that swirl around the Simcoes to this day. Stay tuned!
