Welcome to my pages for To
Dance at the Palais Royale.
This book is set in Toronto in the late 1920s, and is based very
loosely
on the lives of my mother's three oldest sisters, Barbara, Jean and
Janet McIvor. My main character, Agnes Maxwell, is the
seventeen-year-old daughter of a Scottish coal miner who comes to
Toronto in 1928 to work as a domestic servant. This is what my aunts
did as well, but Aggie has adventures my aunts would never have
imagined.
Long before I wrote this book, I interviewed my aunts and my mother
about coming to Canada in the 1920s, and about working as domestic
servants. If you want to know what life was like for these young women,
visit Aggie's World.
In To Dance at the
Palais Royale,
Aggie admires her rich friend Rose's fashionable clothes. The 1920s was
a decade of high fashion and radical change. Here's a page about Fashions in the 1920s.
Toronto was a very different place in the 1920s. If you want to find
out what the city was like, visit Toronto in the 1920s.
Life changed a great deal in the 1920s. Women wore shorter skirts,
sleeveless dresses and makeup for the first time. Social life was more
relaxed and freer than it had been, but people were still bound by
rules that seem strange to us today. To learn about life in the 1920s,
you can play The
Roaring Twenties,
the McCord Museum's wacky introduction to the lives of middle class
anglophones living in Montreal at this
time. You can play this interactive game with a friend and keep score.
Play all four sections, and you'll find out how your life would have
turned out. (This link will take you out of my website, but it's
really worth
a look.)
If you are a teacher, visit my Teachers' Resources Page.
I've found some wonderful sources for research, games related
to
the time period, and educational links to inspire
assignments.
To read
part of To Dance at the Palais Royale, visit this Excerpt Page.
Click on this link to learn about the song "She's like the Swallow."
Back to main page
The wallpaper on this page was
designed using graphics from Art Nouveau Patterns and Designs, R.
Beauclair,
Bracken Books, London. Copyright 1988.
Used with permission.
