Meeting: February 2010
Although Kit Coleman was a private person behind the facade of her newspaper columns, Professor Fiamengo told us the story of her life she had pieced together for her book. It was a life that Kit herself proclaimed to be unorthodox.
Born in Ireland, she migrated to Canada where she worked for the he Toronto Mail as a columnist until 1911. It was while working for that newspaper that she became, in 1898, the first accredited female Canadian war correspondent.
Fiamengo noted that womenís pages were introduced as regular features of Canadian newspapers in the 1800s. Although Kit Coleman, who knew French, Italian, Spanish and Latin, wrote for such pages, her column didnít stick to the usual womenís pages topics. She preferred to write about world events, sprinkling her columns, called ìKitís Kingdomî, with quotations from many sources. Consequently she had many male readers as well as women. And she received letters from readers, whom she called her ëpaper friendsí, from numerous places around the world as well as across Canada. Her writing included advice to readers who wrote to her. To illustrate why readers found her daily columns so fascinating for three decades, Fiamengoís handout included some of Kitís responses to her readers that ran in her columns.
Other books about Kit Coleman include Barbara Freidmanís Kit’s Kingdom, and Ted Fergusonís book called Queen of Hearts.
Kit Coleman, who died in 1915, created a personan said Fiamengo, who left us with the question, is the person we meet in her columns really her?
http://www.english.uottawa.ca/faculty/fiamengo.html