In the 1930s, when Canada faced depression and labor struggles, shadowed by European fascism, Canadian readers made a best-seller of a gentle story set a hundred years earlier in an unaggressive rural Ontario. The Yellow Briar (1933) is presented from the point of view of an outsider named Patrick Slater, one of the Irish orphans adrift in Ontario after the famine and cholera of the 1840s. The strange revelation that the Irish "Paddy" was in fact the mask of Toronto WASP lawyer John Mitchell added to the attraction of the book. Mitchell used the pseudonym for three subsequent publications but never recaptured the runaway popularity of his loving, moving, subtly Canadian version of the archetypal story of the orphan in an alien world.

John Wendell Mitchell, born on the family farm near Mono, Ontario, was the surviving son of a strong-willed mother and a bookish, restless father. His father...