Gilbert Parker

Sir Horatio Gilbert George Parker, 1st Baronet (23 November 1862 – 6 September 1932), known as Gilbert Parker, Canadian novelist and British politician, was born at Camden East, Addington, Ontario, the son of Captain Joseph Parker, R.A.

Education and employment

He was educated as a teacher in Ottawa and taught at Marsh Hill and Bayside schools in Hastings County before becoming a teacher at the Ontario Institute for the Deaf and Dumb (in Belleville, Ontario) in 1882. From there he went on to lecture at Trinity College, federated with the University of Toronto. In 1886, he went to Australia, and for a while became associate editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He also traveled extensively in the Pacific, Europe, Asia, Egypt, the South Sea Islands and subsequently in northern Canada. In the early nineties, he began to gain a growing reputation in London as a writer of romantic fiction.

Published works

The best of his novels are those in which he first took for his subject the history and life of the French Canadians; and his permanent literary reputation rests on the fine quality, descriptive and dramatic, of his Canadian stories. Pierre and his People (1892) was followed by Mrs. Falchion (1893), The Trail of the Sword (1894), When Valmond came to Pontiac (1895), An Adventurer of Icy North (1895), and The Seats of the Mighty (1896, dramatized in 1897). The Seats of the Mighty was a historical novel depicting the English conquest of New France (Quebec) with the two opposing generals, James Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm, as two of the book's characters.