I fell down a rabbit hole after reading Merilyn Simonds’ excellent biography, Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay. It tells the story of a Swedish Canadian woman, an aristocrat who led a life of unprecedented twists and turns. She married her White Russian husband while working as a Red Cross nurse during the First World War, joined him on the march through arctic Russia during the Bolshevik revolution, nursed the Dionne quintuplets in northern Ontario, and spent her last fifty years battened into a log cabin about 40 kilometers east of North Bay. There she became a noted ornithologist, self-taught, internationally-regarded, and the author of seven books. 

Merilyn Simonds knew Louise de Kiriline Lawrence in the last decade of her very long life, and wrote a magazine article about her in 1989 when Louise was 95, three years before her death. At the time, Simonds was pressed by publishers to write a biography, but it was a massive project she could only take up later. Luckily Simonds has now pulled Louise de Kiriline Lawrence back from encroaching obscurity in this fine book published by ECW Press. 

As it happens, I was re-reading Alice Munro’s short story collection Open Secrets as I read Woman, Watching, and I was brought up short by a sentence in Munro’s story “The Albanian Virgin.”

“Shops, to these people, are what a cabin in the woods might be to somebody else—a refuge and a justification.”

Louise clearly found refuge in a cabin. But justification? 

Louise Flach was born into the Swedish aristocracy in 1894 and named after her godmother, Princess Louise of Denmark. During World War One, uninterested in life as a socialite, she became a Red Cross nurse. While working in a prisoner-of-war camp, she met another aristocrat, an officer in the Russian White Army, Lieut. Gleb Nikolayevich Kirilin. They would marry in 1918. Shortly afterward, Gleb left for Archangel in the Russian arctic to join the northern division of the anti-communist White army. 

The astonishing Louise followed, talking her way onto troop ships and ice breakers, the only woman on board and subject to both chivalry and sexual harrassment. At the time, Gleb hoped that his White Army division would act as the northern arm of a pincher, meeting the White’s southern and eastern divisions to surround Lenin’s Red Army, defeating its troops before the Bolsheviks were able to take full control of Russia.

The plan proved to be disastrously ill-conceived and poorly executed. After a long and harrowing advance and retreat—Louise remaining with Gleb under appalling conditions—the White Army was forced to surrender in 1920. Gleb was taken to Moscow as a prisoner of war, and once again Louise followed, hoping that under the terms of the White Russian surrender, Gleb would soon be released. Instead, he disappeared from his prison in Moscow, leaving Louise with no idea where he’d been taken. In fact, Gleb Kirilin and 500 other White Army officers were executed in Siberia by the Bolsheviks shortly after their disappearance, but Louise didn’t learn this—or perhaps refused to believe it—for more than five years. 

During that time, she resumed her work as a nurse in post-revolutionary Russia, ranging throughout the Soviet Union as she worked for international aid agencies, treating victims of violence and famine. Part of the reason she stayed in Russia was her hope that Gleb would magically reappear. More prosaically, when she married a foreign national, she’d been forced to relinquish her Swedish passport and take up Russian citizenship, and new Soviet regulations blocked her from leaving.

When she finally despaired of finding Gleb, Louise took advantage of a change in Soviet citizenship laws, called in favours from well-connected Swedes, and managed to leave the Soviet Union. She returned to her family in Stockholm, but unsurprisingly found that she didn’t fit into high society any more than she ever had. Bored and restless, she followed through on a plan she and Gleb had made when they thought he’d be freed from prison: emigrate to Canada. Louise arrived in Montreal in 1927, still only 33 years old. Once again, she found work as a nurse, this time in northern Ontario. In the summer, she drove her old Model T convertible between French-speaking communities. In winter, she mushed a dogsled through the snow.

Chapter Three in her extraordinary life: after seven years in the north, Louise de Kiriline was hired as head nurse to the Dionne quintuplets. Her work saving malnourished children in the Soviet Union helped her develop a plan to treat the premature quints, their unexpected survival allowing the famous sideshow to grow up around them. Over the next decade, millions of visitors would make their way north to gawk at the children. Louise was a witness to the early stages of showmanship, and it revolted her. She also vehemently disagreed with the Ontario government’s decision to seize guardianship of the quintuplets from their parents, primarily as a means to promote tourism to the area. She quit her high-profile job after only a year, bought a lot in the woods, built her cabin, and lived there for all but the last few years of her life, when she moved (again improbably) as a fully sane woman to an asylum in North Bay.

Chapter Four is what interests Merilyn Simonds: the fifty years Louise spent in her cabin, which had no electricity or plumbing for most of her time there. She chopped wood, toted water, depended on an outhouse, and wrote seven books by lantern and candlelight. Along the way, she married a local carpenter, road crewman and snow plow driver named Leonard Lawrence. Eleven years her junior, Lawrence went overseas with the Canadian Army for five years during the Second World War and afterward spent most of the work week on the road, a routine that (to be uncharitable) guaranteed an income for Louise along with the privacy she craved.

Meanwhile, she watched birds. Completely untrained, Louise began to compile ornithological data about her tiny corner of northern Ontario; data that illuminated the behaviour of migratory species touching down in the woods around her cabin. Sitting for hours clothed in branches, braving onslaughts of biting insects, she recorded the unusual nesting habits of Canada Jays and the predation of merlins. Along the way, she became friends with other early female ornithologists and corresponded with the male professors who dominated the field. Writing in English, Louise published 17 scientific papers and books for both children and adults. Six were about birds, and one was a memoir of her years with Gleb that she wrote and rewrote for most of her adult life. It was finally published in 1977 as Another Country, Another Spring: A Love Remembered.

I like watching birds. For the past few days, two migratory white-crowned sparrows have been devouring seed in our backyard—and I hope the sparrow feathers on the ground this morning means a hawk got one of the dozens of local house sparrows rather than one of my migratory friends. Things are a little subdued after a hawk attack, but chickadees still call from the lilacs next door, dropping in to snatch one seed at a time. A mourning dove coos from the fence, and I expect our local pair of cardinals will arrive as usual to feed at sunset. Maybe a blue jay will fly in making a terrible racket while chasing the smaller birds away. The robins seem unfazed.

This makes me the right audience for Woman, Watching. Forty pages at the start of the biography cover the years before Louise moved to her cabin. After that, Simonds hones in on the years Louise spent in the woods and the details of her ornithological research. To this calmer period of Louise’s life, she brings a careful marshalling of facts, clarity and writing of unfailing grace. 

Yet the early drama interested me, and my father’s family is Swedish, although far from aristocratic. So I dove down a rabbit hole, first by reading Louise’s memoir, which covers not only her marriage to Gleb Kirilin, but also her early life in Sweden and Denmark. Simonds also mentions that Louise was related to the Danish writer Karen Blixen—pen name Isak Dinesen, now known mainly for writing Out of Africa—so I read a biography of Dinesen too, along with Out of Africa. Meanwhile, I looked out Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” where one of the characters is said to be based on Dinesen’s Swedish husband, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke. A Scandinavian rabbit hole, and I plan to write about its many burrows.  

Yet in thinking about Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, I’m left considering Alice Munro’s assertion that a cabin in the woods can be both refuge and justification. Louise’s need for refuge is obvious. But justification? 

I’m left to wonder if Munro means that people can justify their need for privacy by setting themselves up in the sort of place where they can be categorized, accepted and ignored. 

In her story, the protagonist is the owner of a bookshop who is both recognized and dismissed as a bookish loner, which lets her get on with what she wants to do. In her cabin in the woods, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence was accepted by local people as a mild sort of hermit, hardy and harmless. She was left alone, which she wouldn’t have been if she’d tried to make a life in either Swedish high society or a small town in northern Ontario. She would have been badgered to conform, probably been miserable and reacted badly. The cabin justified to other people her wish to be alone. “That’s just Louise.”

The fact she wasn’t “just” Louise makes Merilyn Simonds’ book a fascinating read. You can buy it here. 

Lesley Krueger is the author of the memoir Foreign Correspondences.