Victoria’s story through historical fiction

Vanessa Winn interview segment
Produced by Trevor Marc Hughes

*

“We are in Rutledge Park,” Victoria author Vanessa Winn tells me, “which was part of the old Cloverdale estate. We’re very close to Cloverdale Avenue which of course takes it name from the estate of Dr. William Fraser Tolmie, one of the founding families of Victoria.”

Tolmie was part of the fur trade and that establishing industry features prominently in her two works of historical fiction The Chief Factor’s Daughter and Trappings.

“This estate adjoined Hillside Farm, which was John and Josette Work’s farm. The estates joined one another so you would be travelling from one farm to another.”

Through Winn’s research, she has created novels that describe the social fabric of Victoria, during the Victorian Era. The gold rush sets the stage, with hordes of fortune seekers piling into the town by the shipload. But what was it like to live in and around Fort Victoria, an HBC establishment formed around the fur trade?

In this interview segment, Vanessa Winn tells The British Columbia Review about how her research into British Columbia’s historical characters, such as Catherine Work and Charles Wentworth Wallace, and more famed figures in the fur trade such as William Fraser Tolmie, makes vibrant and energizes aspects of Victoria’s early colonial and settler history.