Where practicality met resilience
From Primitive Shack to Premier’s Wife: The Constance Davie Story
by Valerie Green
Victoria: self-published, 2026
$24.50 / 9798278536727
Reviewed by Vanessa Winn
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Victoria author Valerie Green explores the little-known life of Constance Skinner Davie, wife of the eighth premier of British Columbia, in her latest novel From Primitive Shack to Premier’s Wife: The Constance Davie Story. Drawing on extensive research, Green delves into the intriguing question of who was behind Alexander Edmund Batson Davie’s return to politics in the 1880s, and his rise to the premiership when a direly ill man. Re-imaging Constance’s life from birth, she creates an unconventional character capable of exerting influence from the wings of the political arena.
A Prologue describes the shack of the title, the accommodation given to the Skinner family by the Hudson’s Bay Company upon their 1853 arrival from Essex after a gruelling five-month voyage. Weeks later, Mary Skinner, already a mother to five, gives birth to Constance in this one-room shack on “Kanaka Row” (now Humboldt Street). Hired to be a farm bailiff of the Puget Sound Agricultural Company (an HBC subsidiary), her father, Thomas James Skinner, thus began a thorny relationship with his employer. Elected to the first colonial Legislative Assembly of Vancouver Island in 1856, Skinner’s political dissent and discussions with frequent visitors to their Esquimalt farmhouse, Oaklands, ignites a lifelong political interest in his young daughter.
Told in a first-person memoir style, the novel spans Constance’s life and necessarily skims over some periods, focussing on pivotal or illustrative moments. Looking back, Constance’s viewpoint possibly attributes more maturity to her younger self than she had, foreshadowing significant events. A curious, forthright child, she recounts that at age six, “Like everything else in life, I wanted to find out more, so I even questioned religion, which was the foundation of our family life.” Describing her childhood farm chores, a slip from past into present tense briefly blurs the narrative voice.
By 1864, Skinner was disaffected enough with the HBC to uproot his family from their comfortable home and take up independent farming in the Cowichan Valley, then a remote settlement. Like her brave mother, Constance, at age 11, takes the news with surprising practicality and resilience, compared with her older sisters, one of whom had formed an attachment with a Royal Navy officer at the nearby Esquimalt base. Facing rustic conditions while their new house is built, Constance recovers quickly from the heart-wrench of leaving her childhood home.
It is at the Skinners’ new home, Farleigh, that in 1873 Constance meets Alexander Davie. A Victoria lawyer, the first to receive his entire legal training in BC, he is about to embark on a political career in the Cariboo. It would have been interesting to explore the separation of his father, prominent physician and politician Dr. John Chapman Davie, and his mother, who remained in England with her youngest children. While appearing drastic, a removal to the colonies could achieve a lasting separation in a society that otherwise refused to condone it. Despite her curious nature, Constance does not question it.
His parent’s separation likely had an impact on Alexander Davie, then a teen, and his character. It might have helped develop and illuminate the main characters’ responses to the marital ills of Alex’s brothers that Green depicts in the background, such as Dr. John Chapman Davie, Jr., leaving a wife in Victoria to pursue a love affair. Youngest brother and fellow lawyer Theodore, later the tenth premier of BC, married a 14-year-old pregnant girl, scandalously young even by nineteenth-century standards.
In her afterword, Green’s acknowledged changes to the historical details and timeline do not hamper the heartfelt story of Theodore’s child bride succumbing to the rigours of childbirth along with her baby. Witnessing this tragedy inspires Constance and Alex to convert to Catholicism. While Theodore would later convert to his second wife’s Catholic faith, the real motivation for Constance’s and her husband’s earlier conversion remains an interesting mystery.
There are occasional blips that jar the reader, such as referring to Premiers Walkem and Elliott as “Prime Minister,” then reverting to premier again. Some of the book’s formatting is also disjointed, particularly breaking up or merging dialogue, accentuated by the extra space between paragraphs and sometimes missed punctuation. Better proofreading would have given Green’s historical fiction a smoother read.
Alexander Davie is portrayed as a responsible brother and an ideal husband from the beginning. The conflict for Constance is internal, as she comes to question her own ambition in encouraging Alex to accept the premiership upon the death of his predecessor. As Green later notes, his term as premier is difficult to evaluate given his ill health with consumption (tuberculosis). It is challenging to reconcile Constance’s forward-thinking support of Indigenous Peoples with her husband’s lack of recognition of land claims while head of a commission into “disturbances” at Metlakatla, resulting only in a government survey of the land. This is glossed over in the couple’s disappointment in the commission’s findings, despite Constance’s advice, in a marriage characterized by nearly perfect accord.
Governing in absentia during the winter from California, Alex hoped to recuperate his health. His circumstance placed Constance in a singular position to influence politics through her husband’s correspondence. The remarkable death toll of BC premiers in office is foreshadowed by the decline of Constance’s twin sons, revealing the hardships rife through the Victorian age. Both Davie premiers would die in their forties, their demise apparently contributed to by overwork. This is exacerbated for Alexander by concurrently retaining his office of Attorney General, suggesting his attachment to his legal profession and the calling at which he truly excelled.
Green (Tomorrow) acknowledges that the content of Constance’s later political soirées, continued after her husband’s death, are unknown. It is in these types of historical gaps that there is plenty of room for fiction, particularly with limited records for local women in the nineteenth century. There are times, however, that Constance’s attitudes are so progressive for her era that it is difficult to suspend disbelief. Green draws sharp societal irony in Constance’s passionate speech on behalf of Indigenous Peoples, punctuated by instructing Queenie, her Songhees servant, to serve refreshments to the political guests.
The book cover strikingly depicts the novel’s timeline, with the birthplace shack in the foreground and the first legislative ‘Birdcages’ behind it, shadowed by the ghostly illumination of the current Parliament Buildings. It conveys Constance’s life interwoven with the growth of British Columbia through the political careers of her family members. More character development through the many hardships the Davie couple faced would have strengthened the realism of this intriguing story. Certainly, Constance Skinner Davie represents the many untold women who were influential in the background of a political system that excluded them. Green brings much needed attention to the women behind BC’s historical figures and politicians.
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Born in London, UK, Vanessa Winn lives in Victoria, where she received a BA in English Literature at UVic. Her second novel, Trappings, depicts real people and events in mid-19th-century BC during the aftermath of the gold rushes. Her debut novel, The Chief Factor’s Daughter, similarly portrays factually based social history during the Fraser River gold rush and was studied at universities in BC. Winn’s poetry has been published in various journals and she also writes non-fiction. Beyond her passion for the written word and historical research, she also teaches Argentine tango. Please visit her website. [Editor’s note: Vanessa Winn reviewed books by Valerie Green, A.S. (Lana) Rodlie and (once more) Valerie Green for BCR; and her own book, Trappings, is reviewed here by Valerie Green. She contributed a chapter to Métis Matriarchs: Agents of Transition, reviewed by Linda Rogers.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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