Wright, Esther Clark

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1984
ESTHER CLARK WRIGHT
to be Doctor of Letters

When our former Dean of Arts and Professor of History, Stewart MacNutt, was once asked on whom he most relied for his own History of New Brunswick, he replied, without hesitation, "I rely on Wright," and, were he alive today, he would be delighted to see that, at last, we honour the object of his admiration.

Dr. Esther Clark Wright's family is steeped in a pre-Loyalist, nonconformist tradition. Most of the fourteen books which she has written, and other books and articles which she is writing, are informed by the profoundly felt conviction that historians of the Province have concentrated too much on the political history of the Anglican Establishment, and have hitherto ignored the stubborn strength of the ordinary people and "the simple annals of the poor."

If, in fact, as Lord Macaulay once said, oratory is not truth but persuasion, then the orator is out of harmony with the work of Esther Clark Wright. For facts, and the truth that springs from them, are her first concern, and the immense labour which went into her pioneering, revisionist book on The Loyalists of New Brunswick would daunt even the historian of today with his research assistants and the resources of the computerized world. Later historians, using the staggeringly detailed scholarship of Dr. Wright's work, have been able to theorize and, like the orator, even to persuade.

Yet, although Esther Clark Wright has concentrated her attention on the Maritime Provinces, and, especially, on New Brunswick, the pattern of her life is far wider than the fields by the Saint John River, celebrated in her books on The Saint John River in 1949 and 1966. In the words of our own poet, Fred Cogswell, she has also looked to "wider regions where the river goes." She studied at the Universities of Toronto, Oxford and Harvard, lectured at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where she now lives, and made many trips to other continents of the world.

During the last decade, she has produced three more books -- The Ships of St. Martin's (1974), Saint John Ships and their Builders (1977), and Planters and Pioneers (1979).

Esther Clark Wright was born in Fredericton and, with the strong Baptist upbringings of the family, it is perhaps unusual, although appropriate for New Brunswick, that her father should have been our Lieutenant-Governor from 1940 to 1945, representing a monarchy which had the Anglican Church as its religious bastion.

Although her family ties in our province go back over two hundred years, Esther Clark Wright is still truly a pioneer and, as befits a pioneer, she has paddled her canoe for mile after mile on the Saint John River and its tributaries.

Dr. Thomas Harrison, who became the first nonconformist President of the University of New Brunswick a century ago, would have been as delighted as Professor MacNutt would have been to see the lady whom we honour today in the Bicentennial Year of our Province.

Insignissime Praeses, amplissima Cancellaria, tota Universitas, praesento vobis Esther Clark Wright ut admittatur honoris causa ad gradem Doctoris in Litteris in hac Universitate.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 2