Four Days in November

When 18-year old Annie Shepard boarded a ship in Liverpool in 1884 she didn’t care where she was headed as long as it meant she got away from the factory where she’d worked since she was a girl.

And if the sponsors who financed her passage to the wilds of Canada expected her to marry, have children, and stop the colony’s slide into depravity, she considered it a fair trade.

Still, the idea that she would have a civilizing influence on Vancouver strikes Annie as ridiculous because she knows she is no innocent. But if she can curb her factory-girl predilections, she can break away from her old life, even here, a place that is little more than a sawmill and a string of saloons along the waterfront.

But when a remarkable change occurs in Vancouver’s fortunes a year later, the tiny settlement is transformed into a metropolis teeming with ambitious land speculators there to cash in on the development. Suddenly there are hundreds of eligible young men wearing suits instead of overalls, offering Annie the chance for a life better than she’d ever imagined.

The same year, amid the disruption of a riotous mob storming the sawmill, a hotly contested municipal election, and a fire that decimates the young city, Annie and her beau get married just in time to avoid a scandal. But all is not well and after only a few years, Robbie’s obsession with climbing the social ladder at the expense of his family reaches a breaking point and Annie’s loyalty begins to waver.

A decade later, the feminist movement, and her own sister’s role in the telephone operators’ strike tests Annie’s loyalties and forces her to make a decision she’d been resisting for years.

Interweaving authentic history and fiction, with a background of land speculation, confiscation of Squamish territory, and women’s suffrage, Four Days in November tells of a little known era in Vancouver’s history and the changing place of women in Edwardian society.