Elinor Florence grew up on a Saskatchewan farm and earned degrees in English and journalism. She worked for newspapers in all four Western provinces, spent eight years writing for Reader’s Digest Canada, and even published her own award-winning community newspaper. Her first novel, Bird’s Eye View, was a national bestseller, while the second, Wildwood, was named one of Kobo’s Hundred Most Popular Canadian Books of All Time. Finding Flora was inspired by her own Scottish homesteading and Indigenous ancestors. She is a member of the Métis Nation of British Columbia and makes her home in the mountain resort of Invermere.
Bestselling author Elinor Florence tackles yet another unexplored historical topic in her new novel — women homesteading alone.
Finding Flora, to be published by Simon & Schuster Canada in April 2025, tells the story of Scottish immigrant Flora Craigie, who leaps from a speeding train in 1905 to escape an abusive husband and finds herself alone on the Alberta prairie. Desperate to survive, she seizes the opportunity to claim a homestead and bonds with four other women to battle crooked land agents and a hostile government.
“Women’s stories have been largely unsung and unrecorded, so it is my honour to bring their accomplishments to light,” Elinor says. “I call my novels fact-based fiction, since they are all grounded in truth.” Inspired by both her homesteading and her Indigenous ancestors, the new novel is dedicated to her great-grandmother, a Scottish-Cree woman from Red River, Manitoba. Elinor is a member of the Métis Nation of B.C.
Elinor grew up on a Saskatchewan farm and worked as a journalist for decades before turning her hand to fiction, where her writing and research skills are evident. Her debut novel Bird’s Eye View is a Canadian bestseller. It tells the story of prairie farm girl Rose Jolliffe, who joins the air force in the Second World War and becomes an aerial photographic interpreter, spying on the enemy from the sky. It became a Canadian bestseller, listed in both the Toronto Star and the Globe & Mail.
Her second novel, Wildwood, is a contemporary story with a historical angle. Broke and desperate, Molly Bannister accepts the ironclad condition laid down in her great-aunt’s will: to spend one year in an abandoned, off-the-grid farmhouse in the remote backwoods of northern Alberta. Wildwood was named by Kobo as One of the Hundred Most Popular Canadian Novels of All Time. It has now been optioned by a movie company.
Married with three grown daughters, Elinor lives on the shores of Lake Windermere, British Columbia. Her passions are history, village life, heritage buildings, museums, and flea markets. “I’m absurdly nostalgic for the bygone days of my parents and grandparents,” she explains.
For the past eleven years she has shared those passions with readers through her monthly blog, Letters From Windermere. Read more about Elinor and subscribe to her blog at www.elinorflorence.com.
