As a poet, novelist, journalist, lecturer, musician, and composer, Susan Frances Harrison was a prominent cultural figure in central Canada during the last decades of the nineteenth century, known particularly for her interest in French Canada. Music was her first love; in 1888 Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald reported that "musical composition, were it not for the great difficulties attending it, would be [Harrison's] preferred ideal profession." Her frustration at not being able to arrange for the publication or performance of "Pipandor," the opera on which she worked with F. A. Dixon for two years, is reflected in the title story of her first book, Crowded Out! And Other Sketches (1886).

Harrison was born Susan Frances Riley in Toronto on 24 February 1859, the daughter of John and Frances Riley, and educated there and in Montreal, where at the age of sixteen she reportedly began to publish poetry in the Canadian Illustrated News under...