McGill Library
McLennan Library Building3459 rue McTavish
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 0C9
Janet March Fonds
Fonds
12 scrapbooks and 0.5 cm of other textual records.
Janet March was the pseudonym of Agnes Honoria Wrong Armstrong. Polly, as she was known to her family, was the mother of The Montreal Gazette journalist and author Julian Armstrong. The youngest child of George and Sophia Wrong, Agnes was born in Toronto on 31 March 1903. She attended Havergal College and the University of Toronto, graduating with a BA in modern history in 1925. Following graduation, Agnes worked for Eaton’s Shopping Service until her marriage in 1928. She married Charles Harold Algeo Armstrong, a Toronto barrister who, in 1921, had been principal private secretary to Prime Minister Arthur Meighen. She first started writing about food in Saturday NIght, taking over her sister-in-law Cynthia Brown's column from time to time. She officially took over the column under the name Janet March after Cynthia Brown passed away, and kept it for several years (1939-1947). She served with a number of community organizations, including the Junior League of Toronto. She was appointed managing editor of the Junior League Mail in 1934 and president of the League in 1936. In 1940 she was elected Canadian representative to the board of the Association of the Junior Leagues of America and, in 1942, its secretary. She was also an active member of the Havergal Old Girls’ Association. She died in Toronto in December 1995.
Collected by her daughter Julian Armstrong and donated to the library in the summer of 2018.
The fonds reflects Agnes Honoria Wrong's career as a columnist and mainly consists of scrapbooks containing food columns published in different Canadian newspapers chiefly under the pen name Janet March. Janet March's real name was Agnes Honoria Armstrong Wrong, and she wrote under many pen names. The earliest columns (1931-1933) are signed "Suzette" and were published in the Saturday Night Magazine (Toronto) Some other food-related columns published in the Junior League Magazine (1933-1935) are signed "Epicure". Later columns in the Saturday Night Magazine (1939-1946) are ordered more or less by year in specific scrapbooks. Articles about history of food, as well as recipe columns, were published monthly in the Globe & Mail (1956-1962), some of them under her real name. Part of the material is loose in envelopes or within already filled scrapbooks, including pre-publication typed articles. Also are included a few letters addressed to the creator (reader's mail).
Donation from Julian Armstrong