Helen M. Johnson

Helen M. Johnson was the publication name of Helen Mar Johnson, a nineteenth-century poet from Magog in what is now Quebec. Born in 1834, she contributed verse to newspapers and published a small collection in 1855 before her early death in 1863. Canadian wild Flowers gathers selections from her poetry and prose, including rural observation, patriotic verse, religious meditation, and reflections on mortality. The volume was issued in Boston in 1884, more than twenty years after Johnson's death. John Muir Orrock selected the writings, wrote a biographical sketch, and incorporated material from her diary, making the book both a literary collection and a record of her life. Its nature poems attend closely to forests, birds, flowers, farms, and the landscape around Magog, while other pieces address Canada, faith, and private feeling. Johnson's work forms a foundational record in Canadian women's writing, and the collection preserves a voice otherwise scattered through periodicals and earlier anthologies.