Gilbert Parker

The Pomp of the Lavilettes (Dodo Press) Gilbert Parker

Sir Horatio Gilbert George Parker, 1st Baronet PC (1862-1932), known as Gilbert Parker, Canadian novelist and British politician, was born at Camden East, Addington, Ontario. He was educated at Ottawa and at University of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. Parker started as a teacher at the Ontario School for the deaf and dumb (in Belleville, Ontario). From there he went on to lecture at Trinity College. In 1886 he went to Australia, and became for a while associate editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He also traveled extensively in the Pacific, Europe, Asia, Egypt, the South Sea Islands and subsequently in northern Canada. In the early nineties he began to make a growing reputation in London as a writer of romantic fiction. The best of his novels are those in which he first took for his subject the history and life of the French Canadians; and his permanent literary reputation rests on the fine quality, descriptive and dramatic, of his Canadian stories.