Abstract. This chapter focuses on the short fiction of Isabella Valancy Crawford, and how Crawford used the Gothic romance genre to craft fictional heroines who gain more autonomy and greater freedom than their late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary forbears. Imagined Homelands has much to offer readers with an interest in form and affect as well as to scholars with specific interests in nineteenth-century colonial culture. The book's exploration of the relationship between poetry and feeling in colonial contexts combines impressive academic rigour with an appealing emotional resonance of its own. 1] The standard scholarly edition of Malcolm's Katie: A Love Story is D. M. R. Bentley (London, Canada: Canadian Poetry Press, 1987; PS 8455 R3M34 1987 ROBA). He supplies a wealth of literary parallels with the works of poets who influenced Crawford (e.g., Shakespeare and Tennyson). The RPO text, like that of Bentley, follows the only edition supervised Crawford herself, the 1884 edition The prize-winning entry in a national competition for distinctively Canadian fiction, Winona was serialized in a Montreal story paper in 1873. The novel focuses on the lives of two foster-sisters raised in the northern Ontario wilderness: Androsia Howard, daughter of a retired military officer, and Winona, the daughter of a Huron chief. As the story