Clara Thomas (1) (1919–2013)

Clara Thomas, née McCandless, was born in a small town in southwest Ontario, Canada. Her mother Mabel Sullivan McCandless ran the local dress shop and her father Basil McCandless the grocery store. In 1937, Clara began studying at the University of Western Ontario, where she quickly fell in love with Morley Thomas, a freshman classmate. She thought the dearth of Canadian authors on the college syllabus was not right, and set her mind to correct it one day. She graduated in 1941 with a bachelor's degree and married Morley Thomas the following year in Winnipeg, where he was working as a meteorologist. While there, she taught university courses to Air Force pilots in training. After returning to Ontario, she worked at the University of Western Ontario library while completing her master's degree. She decided to focus her thesis on Canadian authors, which was such a radical idea at the time that the authors she contacted didn't answer her questions. At the end of World War II, she and her husband moved to Toronto, where she split her time between being a homemaker and teaching extension courses. Around the time her oldest son started kindergarten, she applied to the University of Toronto's PhD program in English. But administrators there rebuked and shamed her for wanting a career. She waited another seven years to apply again. This time she was accepted, and Northrop Frye, her thesis advisor, fully supported her interest in Canadian writers. He also urged her to publish her thesis in book form, Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson (1967). She completed her doctorate in 1962, having been hired the year before as the first woman in the English department at York University. She is best known for her books on Margaret Laurence, including The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence (1975). Other books included Canadian Novelists: 1925-1945; and William Arthur Deacon: A Canadian Literary Life (1982). She produced important essays on Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, and Sara Jeannette Duncan. Prof. Thomas taught for 40 years, retiring in 1984, but continued to publish, including her memoir Chapters in a Lucky Life (1999), and numerous book reviews in academic journals. She was elected to the Royal Society of Canada and granted honorary degrees from York, Trent and Brock universities.