Author Elisabeth Harvor wrote sympathetically about the women of her generation

In her fiction and poetry, Elisabeth Harvor caught something that was in the air. She was part of a cohort who reached maturity when no-fault divorce came into being in Canada in 1968 and extramarital sex, verified by private detectives, stopped being the requisite precondition for a married couple to dissolve their union. Prior to that time, Canada had no federal divorce law, and two provinces, Quebec and Newfoundland, had no provincial divorce law either. The legal change not only led to an increase in divorce, which was no longer shameful, but facilitated a search for personal freedom by women trapped in unhappy unions.Ms. Harvor wrote sympathetically and without judgment of divorced women of her generation, tracing their search for happiness. In her 2004 novel, All Times Have Been Modern, the protagonist, Kay, tells her younger lover, Galbraith, about her former husband, attempting to explain why they had split up: “The nights we used to discuss divorce were our happiest times,” she says. “These were our most deeply married times, the times we would lie in bed late at night and whisper about divorce.”