Clara Thomas

Clara Thomas (née McCandless; May 22, 1919 – September 26, 2013) was a Canadian academic. A longtime professor of English at York University, she was one of the first academics to devote her work specifically to the study of Canadian literature, and was especially known for her studies of Canadian women writers such as Anna Brownell Jameson, Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, Isabella Valancy Crawford and Margaret Laurence. She then applied to the University of Toronto to pursue her doctorate, but her application was declined because she was married; the first woman ever hired as a faculty member by that department and only the second female academic hired by the entire university.

Her published work during her career at York included an essay on Moodie and Traill for the anthology The Clear Spirit; Ryerson of Upper Canada, a biography of Egerton Ryerson; The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence, a critical study of Laurence's Manawaka sequence of novels; contributions to the omnibus Literary History of Canada; Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson; and William Arthur Deacon: A Canadian Literary Life, a biography of Deacon, coauthored with colleague John Lennox, which was a shortlisted finalist for the Toronto Book Awards in 1983.

Thomas retired from full-time teaching in 1984, but remained with York as a professor emeritus and a research fellow in Canadian studies. She continued to write literary criticism and biographical work for academic journals, as well as the afterwords for the New Canadian Library editions of works by Jameson, Laurence, Traill and Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé, and published the memoir Chapters in a Lucky Life in 1999.

Death and legacy In 2005, York University's library system renamed its archival division the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections in her honour.

Thomas died on September 26, 2013, in Strathroy.