Summary
Ellen Ross (1816?–1892) emigrated from Scotland to Montreal at mid-century and wrote two 
Gothic novels, in one of which – Violet Keith, An Autobiography (1868) – she used the Canadian 
setting as a fantastic Gothic locale in which to explore areas of social and sexual transgression. 
Drawing on earlier traditions of European Gothic, including Sir Walter Scott’s mythologized 
Scottish landscape, and on an emerging North American genre of convent exposés, Ross’s writing 
accommodates female protest, distances it from reality and allows its dissipation in conventional 
denouements. If female Gothic can be read as an analogue of realistic women’s problems, then 
perhaps this analogy can be extended to encompass emigration and immigrant life. $e paper 
analyzes Ross’s motifs of loss, imprisonment, solitude, surveillance and deliverance and considers 
the possibility that Gothic motifs in her work both conceal and express features of the immigrant’s 
psychic battle with the transition to the New World. 
Keywords: female Gothic, Canadian immigration, Ellen Ross
 Povzetek
Ellen Ross (1816?–1892) je emigrirala iz Škotske v Montreal na sredini devetnajstega stoletja 
in tam napisala dva gotska romana. V romanu z naslovom Violet Keith, avtobiografija (1868) 
je uporabila kanadsko okolje za prizorišče gotskega dogajanja, v katerem se je lotila obravnave 
družbenih in spolnih prekoračitev.
Rossijino pisanje izhaja iz zgodnje tradicije evropske gotske književnosti, vštevši mitologizirano 
škotsko pokrajino Walterja Scotta, ter iz porajajoče se severnoameriške zvrsti svetohlinske 
čistosti, ki ustvarja plodna tla za žensko kljubovanje, odmik od stvarnosti in konvencionalnega 
razpleta. Če je mogoče brati žensko gotsko književnost v povezavi s stvarnimi problemi ženske, 
omenjena analogija zaobjema območje izseljenskega in priseljenskega življenja. Članek analizira 
Rossijine motive izgube, jetništva, samote, nadzora in osvoboditve ter se sprašuje, ali vsi ti motivi 
morda niso le odraz hkratnega prikrivanja in izražanja notranjega boja priseljenke s prehajanjem 
v območje novega sveta.
Ključne besede: ženska gotska književnost, priseljevanje v Kanado, Ellen Ross
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.3.1-2.169-182

Scottish immigrants helped to create Canada and played a vital part in the development of trade 
and industry that fuelled Canadian expansion before and after Confederation (1867). $is is the 
immigration story sanctioned by history and oral tradition – a well-known mythology featuring 
Scots hardihood, canniness and staunch Presbyterianism. $e task of this paper is not to debunk 
this myth, but to explore one concurrent counter myth negotiating the contact between a Scottish 
immigrant and Canadian reality. In the Gothic novels of a mid-nineteenth-century emigrant, 
Ellen Ross, one finds a fantastic story of emigration, imprisonment and deliverance that lends 
itself to decoding in the light of the emigrant’s experience. 
$e type of reading I will attempt here is based on the precedent set by the critics who read female 
Gothic as an analogue to the repressions and exclusions of real women’s lives (Kate Ferguson Ellis, 
J. Fleenor). If such hidden tales can be told through the medium of the Gothic, then perhaps 
the story of other, more overt types of women’s experience could be similarly encoded.  While 
attending to metaphorical readings, this study will nevertheless begin by considering the possible 
historical basis of the heroine’s negative emigrant experience. For if the Gothic sections of Ross’s 
novel, Violet Keith,  An Autobiography, are to be read in relation to real immigrant experience, 
then we must ask what that experience was like for women in the nineteenth century, and how 
they expressed their feelings about it.
Additionally, there is the question of the inspiration for the Gothic section of the novel. Some 
critics have assumed that the nunnery Gothic traces its lineage to other sensational anti-Catholic 
literature of the nineteenth century in North America. However, an examination of the main 
features of this type of writing suggests that this is not an adequate account of this novel’s literary 
ancestry. Violet Keith is a type of Gothic that is not completely traceable to works such as Awful 
Disclosures by Maria Monk, of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836) and its imitators; there 
is evidence to believe that some of the Gothic features relate instead to Sir Walter Scott’s border 
Gothic. 
My final contention, then, is that Ross, a Scottish emigrant, writes a form of Gothic closer to 
home models than to those of the New World, while using that form to express the experience 
of entering the New World. $e known facts of the author’s life are slim. Born Ellen Edith Alice 
McGregor, the author lived in Banff and Inverness before emigrating to Montreal in the early 
1850s. Widowed, and with two children, Ellen Stalker remarried Alexander Ross of Inverness 
and bore two more children before the family’s voyage to Canada. Since few have actually read 
Violet Keith, I will briefly sketch the plot’s main events. 
Violet Keith and her brother are orphaned and left with only memories of a genteel French 
mother and her Bible, which on her deathbed she bade them cherish. $e Bible’s cover conceals 
documents that show the parents’ marriage to be legal. Although the mother tries to signal to the 

children the importance of what is concealed in the Bible’s binding, Violet and her brother fail 
to understand.  Only late in the novel does Violet, in re-covering her mother’s gift, discover the 
hidden marriage documents.
After a boarding-school education, Violet becomes a governess in the household of the Scott 
family outside Edinburgh. She is sought in marriage by the family’s eldest son, Robert. His 
father objects and Violet is driven from the house. She hears of an opportunity to teach in 
Canada, and takes ship. Following her friend Gertrude, Violet arrives at a convent school in 
Canada. Although the prioress is sympathetic, there is one nun who terrifies Violet, and soon the 
persecutions of that nun have transformed the convent into a prison. Violet ends up starving in 
a haunted dungeon, containing a dangerous pagan well, and escapes only as the convent burns 
down. Rescued by Robert, Violet uncovers the bible, finds the family documents and finally gets 
the family inheritance. Violet and Robert marry and make their home in Scotland. 
Clearly, the change from Scotland to Canada is the catalyst for the change from a realistic, 
domestic story – a version of the familiar property restoration plot – to a tale of Gothic torture 
and imprisonment.
Before considering whether the nunnery experience in the novel can be a metaphorical analogue 
for immigrant experience, we must briefly consider to what extent if any it could be a more direct 
record of experience. After all, the novel is subtitled “An Autobiography.” What did happen, 
then, in mid-nineteenth century in Catholic convent schools in Montreal? In particular, what 
were the experiences of single female immigrant teachers? Could Violet’s experience as a migrant 
teacher might be less fantastic than first appears? 
First one must establish where these Canadian convents were located. Violet is imprisoned at 
a nunnery in “Algona,” Canada. $is is an invented place, quite different in intent and effect 
from the real places named in the sensation literature. Although there are townships in Ontario’s 
Renfrew County west of Ottawa called North and South Algona, it is unlikely that Ross 
envisioned an Ontario setting. $e author seems to have distributed the geographical specifics 
in such a way as to dis-locate the reader.
1
 Her Algona, “one of the first cities in Canada” (147), 
is reached by steamboat, two to three days travel from Montreal--her one definite place name. 
Neither Kingston nor T oronto, this might possibly be Ottawa. $e urban setting and twin 
nunneries, however, almost mandate a Quebec setting, perhaps based on Ross’s knowledge of 
Quebec City’s Ursuline Convent School, or the Hotel-Dieu establishments of either Quebec 
City or Montreal.
Such convent schools did exist in Quebec City, Montreal and Ottawa.  $ere is also evidence 
that single female immigrants were considered to be at risk. $ere were protests about conditions 
of immigration among single women, and some attempts to ameliorate conditions for this 


category of emigrant worker. In 1879 Elsie von Koerber published a pamphlet called Reception 
and Protection of Female Immigrants in Canada, in which she speaks of “tales of shocking 
abuse of this special kind of emigration; the traffic, in fact, which is made with women as a 
purchasable merchandise” (Koerber 1879, 5). $e pamphleteer’s concern was the vulnerability of 
unaccompanied female immigrants to prostitution – a moral danger rather than a physical one. 
Violet’s fears, therefore, may not belong entirely to the realm of the fantastic, although it is clear 
that at mid-century the main threat to any immigrant – male or female – was dying of cholera. 
$e real convent schools were more rational places than Violet’s St. Mary’s. For example, the 
1883 prospectus for the Congregation of Notre Dame school for girls in Ottawa (one possible 
location for Ross’s Algona) reveals a place tolerant, if not actually secular. $e school accepts 
young ladies of any denomination, and promises to exercise “no undue influence” (8) on the 
religious opinions of non-Catholic pupils. Good families sent their daughters to convent schools 
for snobbish reasons, not religious ones. Related to the “oldest educational establishment in 
Canada” founded by Margaret Bourgeois in 1656, the Ottawa establishment does, however, 
retain some conservative structures: correspondence is supervised, visiting is limited, students’ 
money is held by the Mother Superior, and the school uniform is black. Each of these details, 
so mundane in the cheery prose of the prospectus, is transformed into something sinister in the 
account of Violet’s imprisonment. 
One has to look almost two centuries earlier than when Ross was writing to find historical 
evidence of convent conditions approximating those Ross describes. In the mid-seventeenth 
century, for instance, the sisters of the Ursuline convent in Montreal received young Iroquois 
girls as slaves. Closer to Ross’s time, 3724 children died while in the care of the Grey Nuns of 
Montreal (1847). $e rearing of foundlings was one of the chief functions of charitable convent 
institutions, but the death rate for foundlings was an unbelievable 87%. However, one must 
put this statistic into perspective; Montreal in general had a frighteningly high infant mortality 
rate even in 1869. Small children did die in the care of the nuns, but this does not make their 
establishments into the sinister places of torture that Ross depicts. 
As for the happiness and satisfaction of immigrant female teachers, the evidence is partial and 
inconclusive. Immigration societies do record concerns for the safety and morality of female 
immigrants. Nothing, however suggests that convents were luring underpaid Scottish teachers to 
Montreal and using them as classroom slaves. Instead, we have the testimony of a contemporary 
immigrant teacher, Mrs. Simpson, giving the valedictory address to the graduating class of her 
own school in Montreal in 1863, who testifies that “. . . I, at all events, have been so happy in my 
professional career in Canada that I have lost all homesickness, and desire nothing better than 
to end my days in this my adopted country” (Simpson 1863). T estimony like this allows us to 
assume that Violet’s terrifying experience is pure fiction. 
Since nothing from the historical record corroborates Violet’s story of starvation and 
entombment, then the lurid parts of her story (the insane nuns, the dungeon, the pagan 
well-spirit) are thus dependent on fictional precedent. $e novel has been associated on 

these grounds with pre-existing popular, anti-Catholic sensation literature. Headed by the 
notorious Awful Disclosures by Maria Monk, of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), 
a stream of lurid revelations about convent life were published during the middle decades 
of the nineteenth century. An earlier example is Lorette, !e History of Louise, daughter of a 
Canadian Nun; exhibiting the interior of female convents (New York, 1833), and one much 
closer to Ross’s own time is Sarah J. Richardson’s Life in the Grey Nunnery of Montreal; an 
authentic narrative of the horrors, mysteries and cruelties of convent life (Boston, 1858). $e 
critic Jeffrey Wollock has placed Violet Keith firmly in this tradition (Wollock 1974, 85–6). 
However, Ross’s novel differs from these earlier sensational accounts in several respects, in 
particular in the use of corroborative detail, the political subtext and the degree of anti-
Catholic sentiment in the text.  
$e clearest difference between Ross’s novel and the anti-Catholic literature concerns 
corroborative Canadian detail. $e other accounts all make references to objective place 
names, topography and geographical features. All of them name the priests, and all depict 
details of the world outside the convent once the victims have escaped. $e escape route 
and its concomitant deceitful landladies, boatmen and cart men play a prominent role in 
the scandal stories and in their polemics. Such details support each narrative’s claim to 
authenticity. Sarah Richardson’s nun, for instance, escapes to the real town of Ogdensburg, 
then to Albany. She crosses the national border between the United States and the Canadas.  
She meets French speaking people in her flight. $ere is the mandatory ‘teepee and moccasins’ 
scene – a tableau of Indian life that seems to signify authentic Canadian experience. In 
contrast, Violet Keith does not exist in the world of geographical and national facts. Ross 
does not invoke corroborative detail of religious or secular life outside the convent walls. 
$e French nature of French Canada is established by three words: ‘habitans’ ‘charrette’ and 
‘tuque’. $e rescued Violet even chooses to skip the teepee scene (Violet Keith 454). Her 
‘Canadian nunnery’ could be anywhere; its description could easily have been written by 
someone who had never been in Canada at all. $e same is not true of the Scottish part of 
the novel, where the detail of place names, boat schedules, embarkation and disembarkation 
points, local schools and churches testifies to someone who knows that region well. Since 
generalization is not an overall feature of Ross’s narrative technique, its presence in the 
Canadian parts of the novel distances the work decisively from other convent narratives that 
claim to document evidence of the Catholic threat.
Another difference concerns the political subtext of the sensation literature. Escape is a common 
theme, and physical liberation from the convent is always equated with political liberty, and 
compared to the condition of the post-revolutionary United States. Each escaped nun (with 
the exception of Maria Monk) is the “imprisoned American female” and enacts in microcosm 
the Boston T ea Party, Washington crossing the Delaware and so on, culminating in the cry of 
‘Give me Liberty or Give me Death’ in Sarah Richardson’s account. Ross’s Violet Keith, on the 
other hand, lacks this particular political gloss. Ross is not interested in the United States or 
its liberties. It is not that Violet Keith lacks political subtext – far from it. A strong motif of the 
work is the call for independence and responsibility for women, for changes in women’s working 

conditions and for improved education for young women. $e narrator, for instance, laments 
women’s lack of choices in a passage which despairingly paints women’s subordination to others’ 
needs as part of the “discipline of life” (Violet Keith 98). $e authorial voice of this novel is far 
from indifferent to the social and material world. In contrast, its connection to the actual, North 
American political and social world of mid-century is tenuous. 
Different also, is the heroine’s attitude towards Roman Catholicism. $e staunch Protestant 
faith of its heroine finally saves her, but in the middle Violet almost succumbs to the pervasive 
Mariolatry of the convent. She is filled alternately with excitement and dread, “a sort of 
intermittent fever of the mind, having its heats and chills, the former full of a fear I could not 
define” (307). One of the convent paintings, “of the blessed Virgin, her hands clasped, and 
her beautiful head bowed down” (322) reaches out to Violet. “It was so real, it seemed a living, 
breathing woman oppressed with sorrow for her dead. I have more than once felt an impulse 
to take my handkerchief and wipe off the tear which lay upon her cheek” (322). A fascination 
with Roman Catholicism in its maternal forms, especially as embodied in artistic representations 
of the Virgin Mary and in Sister St Angelo, the Prioress, tempers the anti-Catholicism, and 
shows that Violet is conflicted – both repulsed by and attracted to the imprisoning space of 
the convent. $e attraction of the mother figures, not inexplicable in an orphan, is part of the 
Gothic secret that Violet conceals. $is pro-Catholic subtext is downplayed by older traditions 
of the female Gothic, where the Church of Rome and its institutions tend to be identified with 
the patriarchal family and its rulers (Ellis 1989, 45–9). $e role of the Gothic heroine is thus “to 
embody Protestant individualism . . .” (Ellis 1989, 48). Violet’s secret fascination with Mariolatry 
disallows this polarity, without asserting a unified position. 
It is even possible that the real Gothic secret of the book is the sexual nature of the attraction 
felt by the heroine for the all-female world of the convent and, in particular, for its benevolent 
Prioress, who is entombed along with Violet. $is would be only one of several strands of sexual 
irregularity that appear during the course of the novel (an androgynous nun, a voyeur, a priest 
who may be a pederast) but which are never fully explained. $e reader of Violet Keith might well 
expect that these various strands will culminate in one horrific act of taboo violation, as would be 
the pattern in the sensational anti-Catholic texts, but Ross plays a subtler game.  $e unvoiced 
realm of maternal fascination remains firmly in place, though displaced into the Gothic spaces 
of the text, and on to female figures encountered by Violet within them. 
$is secret fascination with the forbidden Catholicism is lacking in the sensation literature, 
where the female narrators have long renounced any attraction to veil or cloister.  $is element 
may, in contrast, represent an imported, Scottish component in Ross’s novel. It is traceable to 
the Gothic motifs used by Sir Walter Scott in his novels, !e Monastery (1820) and !e Abbot 
(1820), in both of which Protestant triumph is preceded by considerable engagement with 
Catholic characters and rituals. We will consider later how Ross’s brand of Gothic both follows 
and adapts Scott’s pattern, as she shapes her material to fit the demands of New World fiction. 
What Ross takes from Scott is a pattern of motifs interweaving Catholic, Protestant and pagan 
beliefs and talismans.

Ross sends the reader to Scott in a section defending the reading of novels as a morally permissible 
activity:
“What! You have never read a novel; never read Sir Walter Scott’s novels?”
“No. I knew Sir Walter Scott as the historian of Napoleon, Swift, Dryden, and others, but 
as a novelist, no.” 
“You have a rich field of enjoyment before you, “said she [Hariote Scott]: . . . How did it 
happen that you never saw a novel?”
“Mrs. Moodie did not approve of young people reading works of fiction, and never 
permitted such books to be in the house.” 
“I dare say; I know that among Protestants those who are considered pious people look 
upon novel-reading as nearly allied to the sin against the Holy Ghost. I simply pity such 
people. “(50–1)
$is intertextual special pleading was common in nineteenth-century Gothic and romantic 
novels, which sought to deflect criticism of their genres. Here it serves to link Ross’s novel with 
the Old World pattern of monastery Gothic, not the New World tradition of sensational nunnery 
polemic. 
Violet Keith, like other North American Gothic writing, does “recycle” (Griffin 2001, 159) certain 
standard elements of the fictional cloistered experience – innocent young woman, duplicitous 
priest, hostile older nun – but it adds prominent elements that are particularly reminiscent of 
Scott’s !e Monastery. For instance, a secret book around which Catholic-Protestant conflict 
swirls haunts the centre of each work. !e Monastery features a ‘black book’ (a copy of the 
scriptures in English – a heretical possession in the 16
th
 century), which is a family possession 
and a mother’s only legacy. Like Violet Keith’s mother, Scott’s Lady Avenel passes on to the next 
generation a secret cached inside a Bible. $e impetus of the plot is to discover what “mystery 
is wrapt in it”. $rough many hidings and revealings and a trial by fire, this bible takes on 
near-magical powers. In Violet’s case, her tattered bible holds the actual power of conferring 
gentility, through the marriage license concealed in its binding – literally ‘wrapt’ in the bible. 
In both novels, the book is a maternal legacy and a source of both power and division within a 
family (brother is divided from brother in !e Monastery). Each book also becomes a source of 
reunification for deserving members of the family. 
In a further striking echo, both Ross’s and Scott’s novels feature pre-Christian spirits associated 
with water, as well as visits to mysterious underground spaces. Also similar in !e Monastery is the 
clash between Protestant and Catholic systems, despite the fact that Scott’s novel remains almost 
completely outside the monastic building. Scott’s historical setting (the novel’s events take place 
somewhere between 1550 and 1575) dictates the co-existence of Catholics and Protestants in 
the Border regions, but Scott has deliberately chosen a plot that hinges on doctrinal differences, 
and ultimately on the conversion of key characters to Protestantism. $rough the agency of the 
black book, Halbert Glendinning is anointed as hero, because he alone is unafraid either of its 
Christian message or of the pre-Christian demon that guards the Avenel family honour. 

Scott’s haunted locales (those manifesting and concealing the Gothic secret of the text) are all 
external – glen, pool, river, and waterfall. His family demon rises from a natural spring, and leads 
the hero, not into a dungeon, but into a grotto or natural cavern. $e landscape Gothic of Scott 
is thus rife with the sublime. It is difficult to believe that Ross hadn’t read !e Monastery, for all 
these motifs are echoed in Violet Keith, where they have been re-incorporated into a monastic 
space – St. Mary’s of Algona (the monastery in Scott’s novel is also called St Mary’s).
Scott’s Gothic is rooted in ethnography, philology, and local history; its fantastic events are 
tempered by the structure of research into the costume, custom, superstition, and artifacts of the 
Borders. Ross borrows the motifs, but has no such ethnographic grounding. It’s not that Quebec 
lacked an eventful pre-history: there was plenty of highly-coloured historical and legendary 
material about the early Jesuit and Ursuline missions in the Canadas.
2
 However, Ross’s narrative 
becomes a-historical as soon as Violet embarks for the New World. We have the irony, therefore, 
that Ross’s Gothic which had available to it a wilderness landscape of undeniable awfulness and 
sublimity, turns its back on that landscape and re-inters a version of Scott’s Gothic in a man-
made architectural space owing more to literary precedent than to any realistic experience of 
external Canadian surroundings.
3
If Ross’s Gothic discourse, based on Scott’s Gothic sublime, denies the Canadian landscape, it 
does, nevertheless, echo the discourse of early women pioneers in Ontario who wrote of their 
settler experience. If we stop thinking of Violet, in European literary terms, as a Gothic victim, 
and consider her instead, in New World terms, as an immigrant to the still undeveloped area of 
the pre-Confederation Canadas, then her bizarre convent experience can be seen as a displaced 
version of the female settler narrative. $e immigration guide and the slightly different settler 
narrative became the best known genres to arise out of nineteenth-century Canada, typified by 
Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and Catharine Parr T raill’s !e Backwoods of 
Canada (1836), and by the much less familiar Canada: why we live in it and why we like it by 
Mrs. Edward Copleston (1861). 
In reading the Gothic ordeal as an analogy of the kind of settler immigrant experience, one is 
taking certain retrospective liberties with the text. Nevertheless, there are hints that legitimate this 
kind of interpretation. T o begin with, the novel situates its actors in an overtly imperial world. 
In Ross’s fiction (including !e Wreck of the White Bear, 1870), characters move from one part of 
the British empire to the other. Army families are common (Ross’s own was an army family), and 
regiments do duty in India and the Canadas. Indian connections both trading (the East India 
company) and military are mentioned, while other characters go out to plantations in the West 
Indies. Back at home, the dockyards of Leith and Glasgow, with ships leaving for all parts of the 
world, seem an unlikely launching place for a Gothic tale, but it is one of this novel’s peculiarities 
that it keeps one eye firmly on Canada as the favored emigration outlet that it actually was for 
Scots. In short, Ross’s fiction evokes a tangible nineteenth-century experience of Britain as the 
hub of an empire whose existence conferred mobility even on lower-class subjects.  


Moreover, Ross drops a broad hint about the emigration subtext by having Violet thrown out 
of a Scottish home where the family name is Scott – perhaps just an unoriginal choice, or, more 
likely subtle confirmation of Violet’s exile from the home of Scotland. After this banishment, her 
experience in many ways replicates the historical one of any would-be emigrant. She gets advice 
from one who has gone before, the experienced Miss Watson: 
“Put off that sad face of yours,” said my companion, giving me a shake as she spoke. 
“Canada is in reality to us governesses not further off than London; were we in the latter 
we could only come home to see our friends at the year’s end, and we would have to work 
for half the sum you are to receive; if you tire of Canada you can come back next year, pay 
your passage, and have fifty pounds in your pocket to live on for a year, if you wish to do 
so. Going to a convent in Canada is part of the romance of governess life; . . .” (218). 
$is advice dwells on two salient details of Canadian emigration: distance and money.  $e 
crucial temptation for many real emigrants must have been the promise of higher earnings in the 
colonies. $e major drawback must certainly have been the impassability of the North Atlantic. 
Real immigrants such as Moodie and T raill never made it home again. Only Miss Watson’s 
final remark concerning the romance of governess life points to the fictional function of Violet’s 
coming trip.  
Despite this reassurance, Violet experiences the sense of loss and anxiety that we find in other 
accounts by female immigrants. Mrs. Edward Copleston reported “feelings of anxiety and 
despondency” at departure, mostly owing to “circumstances over which we had no control” 
(Copleston 1861, 7). $e move across the Atlantic is accompanied by a sense of psychic 
displacement. $is happens despite the fact that Violet, like many real immigrants, is going to 
join someone she knows.
$e personal connection does not prevent her suffering from the loneliness that replicates a 
common immigrant experience: “Our own loneliness struck me painfully,” wrote one real 
immigrant. “Our family group looked so genuinely green and forlorn. . .” (Copleston 1861, 
7–8).  Of life in the bush, Moodie writes, “Man finds himself with God – alone” (Moodie 
1852, 28); “$e homesickness was sore upon me, and all my solitary hours were spent in tears” 
(Moodie 1852, 89). Even her sister, the normally cheerful Catharine Parr T raill speaks of being 
“buried in the solitude of the Canadian woods” (T raill 1836, 29). For Violet and Gertrude, 
convent life releases them from one kind of solitude, only to deliver them into another. 
Accompanying the convent solitude and in apparent contradiction to it, is the experience of 
surveillance, what one critic calls “the pervasive Catholic spying and deceit” (Griffin 2001, 160). 
Violet is constantly watched in the convent. $e masculine nun, Sister Agatha, dogs her footsteps 
and listens at doors. Violet must hide everything she cherishes on her person, for all possessions 
are subject to search. Even the body of the immigrant is not inevitably a site of privacy. $is is a 
frequent refrain in the immigrant accounts too. Susannah Moodie documents the discomfort of 
setting up housekeeping under the direct and critical gaze of lower-class neighbours: “$ere is no 

such thing as privacy in this country” (Moodie 1852, 80). $e business of being observed was 
directly connected to the different class structure of the New World. It was not just being watched, 
but how and by whom that made it uncomfortable. $e problem is connected to the gentility 
that was the reason for emigration in the first place. Many came, like Moodie, to maintain a social 
place, but found themselves in new conditions where the lowest had the right to criticize even the 
most ladylike. Inevitably the definition of the lady would change in the New World, but in the 
meantime, English immigrants like Mrs. Edward Copleston complained that as new settlers they 
were “objects of great curiosity” (48), constantly subject to the stares of the lower class inhabitants. 
Violet’s surveillance is doubly uncomfortable because she is spied on by Sister Agatha, the 
masculine nun who is described at some length: 
I had seen this nun before once or twice, and felt an instinctive dread of her, which I could 
neither account for or shake off. She was a tall, dark, hard-featured woman, with a sullen, 
defiant look; she seemed to me as if she was always plotting mischief. She entered the ward 
in which the Prioress and I were occupied, walking with great strides and a heavy step more 
like a man than a woman . . . (366). 
Dark in complexion, Spanish speaking, coarse of manner and rumored to be from the ‘south,’ 
Sister Agatha compounds many features of otherness, but is accepted as the guardian of the 
convent’s religious purity. T o be watched by her is to be under surveillance by another gender, 
race, religion, class and nationality. $e psychic discomfort of this mirrors the conditions 
complained of by the Ontario settlers, T raill, Moodie and Copleston.   
If one looks closely at Violet’s reasons for emigration, they are congruent with the economic-
social motives of most real emigrants to Canada. First there is economic necessity; without 
any proof of inheritance rights, Violet must support herself in one of the ways sanctioned for 
gentlewomen – she must teach or be a governess. $en there is the impossibility of proving 
gentility without the papers concealed in her Bible. What sends her across the Atlantic is not flight 
from a tyrannical Mr. Scott, but the need for social class maintenance and repair, so common to 
nineteenth-century British emigrants. She comes in order to remain a lady, but ironically has had 
the means to do this with her the whole time: the all-important Bible. $is will be the common 
discovery of all genteel immigrants, who will find themselves in a new system where what makes 
a ‘lady’ is increasingly redefined in the direction of intrinsic moral qualities. $us, although her 
flight appears pure plot device, its Gothic structure replicates the system of social and economic 
expectations in which many emigrants were caught.
$en there is Violet’s experience of imprisonment. Should there be any doubt that this is an 
exaggerated version of negative immigrant experience, some words from Mrs. Copleston will 
serve to correct the picture: 
I could afford to admire the noble forest at a distance, but when the possibility of my being 
imprisoned in its vast depths for the remainder of my life was mooted, I shrank from such an 
ordeal (Copleston 1861, 60; my emphasis). 

Moodie, too, spoke of the Ontario wilderness in terms of a “dark prison” (Moodie 1852, 163) 
from which she had little hope of deliverance: 
At that period my love for Canada was a feeling very nearly allied to that which the 
condemned criminal entertains for his cell – his only hope of escape being through the 
portals of the grave (Moodie 1852, 135).  
$ese passages raise an interesting question: were settlers writing like Gothic novelists, or was 
it the other way around? Traill and Copleston also use the trope of burial alive to describe 
their immigrant experience. $e likelihood is that both female forms of expression – settler 
narrative and Gothic novel – rely on biblical rhetoric as an acceptable avenue for women’s 
expression of excessive emotion. Sections of the Bible such as the Psalms set patterns of 
lamentation for loss and abandonment as well as for rejoicing and deliverance. Ultimately 
Copleston did face her ordeal: despite recording feelings of suffocation in her earliest week 
in Toronto (Copleston 1851, 65), she persevered to become an immigrant success story 
– someone glad to call Canada home. 
In contrast, Violet is placed in an actual dungeon, the nunnery’s crypt. Her cell contains a deep 
well haunted by an evil spirit; she is tempted with meager, salty rations while being deprived 
of drinking water, and all this occurs in a place ostensibly of female refuge. Ross has previously 
given Violet a premonition of this experience in the form of a dream: 
I was lying in a deep dungeon, dug in the bowels of the earth, surrounded by thick darkness 
such as might be felt. I was confined there for some offence, of which I was quite guiltless; 
and it was darkness evermore, and days and months passed away, and was still there, 
surrounded by that black darkness; only once in a long time a faint ray of light came from 
above, and a mysterious hand let down a pitcher of water and a morsel of bread. (Violet 
Keith 116). 
Violet’s nightmare uses the imagery of the Christian mystic, enabling several metaphorical 
readings of the later dungeon ordeal. It is likely that this interpretation of the dungeon as a 
mystic dark night of the soul was the preferred one for the Victorian audience, reading as they 
were from a context steeped in the rhetoric of piety. 
In contrast, I am arguing here that Ross’s convent and its dungeon form a complex example 
of that Gothic “inner space” that Cynthia Griffin Wolff reads exclusively as a metaphoric 
locus for exploring the “dilemmas of female sexuality” (Wolff 1983, 208). I want to broaden 
the tenor of the metaphor to include the female immigrant’s condition and thus to elucidate 
Ross’s point about the emigration system and women’s participation in it. By dwelling on the 
stories of other convent inmates, Ross calls attention to the duplicity of institutions that exist 
ostensibly to provide refuge for victimized women, but in practice serve to imprison them 
and to suppress their stories. Two nuns’ stories illustrate how convents as well as emigration 
systems can lure women in. 

$e story of “Poor Sister Valleiry” (433) is relatively benign: she entered the convent with a broken 
heart. In compensation for worldly losses, the convent offers a life of “self-denying benevolence” 
(212). From this perspective, the convent is a place of healing. However, little actual healing is 
depicted, and long before her dungeon experience, Violet has come to view the convent as a 
limbo, where wounds are kept open and emotional maturation postponed: 
I had become convinced . . . that the ideas I had formerly entertained of the happiness and 
tranquility enjoyed there were entirely fallacious. ... I had learned that gossiping arrogance 
and avarice were rife here as in the world, and I well knew there were breaking hearts wearing 
out a hapless existence that bitterly regretted the irrevocable step they had taken (402). 
Another convent inmate who, like the Canadian immigrant, cannot depart is the novice 
Emma, who entered the convent at fourteen and lost her wits ten months later when confined 
in a haunted dungeon (Violet Keith 435–6). Emma’s is the test case for Violet’s: her grisly fate 
threatens to prefigure the heroine’s unless the cycle of silencing and imprisonment is broken: 
“Would you like to become such an one as the first Emma?” threatens Sister Agatha. $is old 
tragedy haunts the convent in the person of Emma herself, who still lives despite eighty-six 
years as a “raving maniac” (347). Emma embodies the unspoken function of the convent: to 
arrest the female will and mind from puberty (Emma’s presumable stage at 14) to centenary –
her age at death.  Ross stresses the close link between Emma and the convent itself by inserting 
(and fulfilling) a legend “that on the day of Emma’s death, the convent of St. Brides would fall 
to the ground . . .” (437). Both stories establish that the convent is built on a basic hypocrisy, 
that, promising refuge, it produces instead torture, isolation, surveillance, imprisonment and 
a choice of madness or death – of these being exaggerated features of the realistic experience of 
settler life as described by earlier writers.  
$e Catholic Church’s right to exist in the colony is also called in question when the dungeon 
experience reveals to Violet the foundations upon which the actual and sacral structures rely. 
What Violet discovers in the dungeon is that the Christian structure is built upon a pagan 
foundation “some terrible deed of darkness was done there by heathen hands in the days of the 
early Christian settlement” (435). Ross may be evoking an event of 1661–2, when a chaplain 
of the Ursuline monastery in Montreal was killed and allegedly eaten by the Iroquois (Catholic 
Encyclopedia). $e ‘Eaten Missionary’ is perhaps the root of the fascination in all the anti-
Catholic tracts with the eating habits of nuns. In some cases the taboo violation at the heart of 
the convent concerns food – the nuns are eating babies, eating novices or, more mundanely, 
eating meat when they should not. Ross’s narrative eschews these exaggerations from the anti-
Catholic literature, while preserving the motif as a trope covering more interesting issues. 
Violet refuses the salty meat that will create thirst and drive her towards death in the haunted 
dungeon well. She cannot, however, avoid being herself swallowed up, as were the settlers 
in the Canadian wilderness. Like Jonah, she is disgorged, but not before she has seen in the 
dungeon the truth about the body into which she was so nearly subsumed.  
$e great horror of the experience at the convent, finally, is that the whole structure is founded 
upon blood spilled long ago in a monstrous parody of the mass. $e Gothic structure, like the 

structure of any immigrant’s life, is built over an abyss of past violence and wrong. Significantly, 
Violet is strongly tempted to fall into the pagan well that holds the basal evil of the institution: 
this is just one hint of the extent to which Violet is self-imprisoned, self-deluded. Like other, real 
emigrants, she came willingly – “We were not compelled to emigrate,” confesses Moodie (194) 
– and has participated in the maintenance of the very systems of Catholic hypocrisy, on one level, 
and immigrant mythology, on the other, that entrap her. 
One of the subtleties of Ross’s Violet Keith is its suggestion that the Gothic horrors of the convent 
are not all that different from life in the patriarchal home in Scotland. $e cynical Miss Watson 
who counsels emigration also points out this disturbing fact. At home a woman’s gentility is 
preserved by selling the woman’s body in marriage (the mercenary nature of this transaction is 
clearer in Ross’s other novel !e Wreck of the White Bear). In Canada gentility can be purchased 
at the price of accepting both the spatial displacement of the body and the violent displacement 
of original races and creeds. 
$us, although Violet Keith is short of the factual, new-world landscape details that one might 
expect in an emigration account, one can argue that Ross’s Canadian nunnery is a Gothic 
structure that both expresses and conceals Ross’s own conflicted feelings about immigrant life 
in the colony. $is author has her heroine enter a space both geographical and psychological. In 
its combination of isolation, oppression, imprisonment and surveillance, it can represent those 
aspects of the New World experience most unpleasant to the female immigrant, and made even 
less palatable by the fact of voluntary participation. Both Violet and the average immigrant 
actively sought the transition to the New World, and both find that their own desires take 
monstrous form and threaten their lives before delivering them. Violet’s miraculous escape from 
the burned convent perhaps expresses the dearest wish of many emigrants to return ‘home,’ 
just as Violet does to Scotland. Like many nineteenth-century novels by women, Violet Keith 
contains both protest and this measure of acquiescence to conventional wish-fulfillment. $e 
subversive prescriptions of immigration Gothic inhabit the Gothic spaces of the text, echo the 
rhetoric of female immigrant writing and may even indicate an implicit discomfort with the 
initial violence on which the project of New World colonialism was premised.