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Introduction On 5 January 1871, the Dalhousie College Gazette reprinted a paragraph from the Toronto Leader about James De Mille's remarkable success in the United States as a writer of popular fiction: Prof. James De Mill [sic, who won his first fame four years ago by the "Dodge Club" in Harper's is a rapid writer. He is under contract to furnish four serial stories to various magazines in the coming year; it is related that one of his books, "The B.O.W.C." was finished in six days; and he completed, in six weeks, a manuscript which he sold for $2,000. All this is in addition to his regular occupation as Professor of Dalhousie College, Halifax, and the use of his leisure in preparing a textbook on Rhetoric. Between 1865, the year he arrived at Dalhousie, and 1880, the year of his sudden death, James De Mille published some 24 novels. In 1870 alone, he published two novels, The Lady of the Ice and The Cryptogram, as well as three stories for boys in his Brethren of the White Cross (BOWC) series: The "B.O.W.C.": A Book for Boys, The Boys of Grand Pr School and Lost in the Fog. Although well known in his lifetime, De Mille all but disappeared from public consciousness until the 1969 reprinting of A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, a fantasy-satire that immediately reminded readers of the wit, exciting plot-lines and dramatic suspense of which De Mille was capable. Although one of the most successful Canadian-born popular novelists of his generation, De Mille may well have fallen into neglect in Canada after his death because most of his works, unlike The Lady of the Ice, did not feature Canadian settings and characters. The Lady of the Ice appeared at a time when Canadian novelists had to write for international audiences to make money. They also faced the problem common to artists in a new society of creating a fictional social context with recognizable characters in a voice that reflected their time and place as North Americans. Thomas Chandler Haliburton commented on this problem in writing The Old Judge (1849), and Henry James observed a similar situation in Nathaniel Hawthorne's career. Up to a point De Mille resolved this, as did the other three authors, by drawing on his own youthful experiences, by utilizing the past in historical novels, and by having North Americans confront Europe. Quebec City, with its dramatic promontory and romantic history, is the setting for The Lady of the Ice. It was one Canadian landmark familiar to Americans as a tourist destination and through Francis Parkman's histories of the Anglo-French struggles. The novel is a comedy of manners about the garrison society of Quebec that was destined to disappear when the British army withdrew from Canada in 1870 1871, although in the novel the "depletion" of the British colonial presence is blamed on British officers who retire once they find Canadian brides. A peacetime garrison society offered recognizable types of officers and civilians, all engaged in a busy round of gossip and parties. Halifax could offer the same possibilities, but did not have the stunning locale nor the kind of winter required by the plot. Readers of Canadian fiction have always known that winter is the time for courtship, besides serving as a possible metaphor for death and mental confusion. Because he was not attempting a realistic novel saturated with local colour, De Mille made no more than a passing mention of the local French-Canadian townspeople; his garrison characters were an Anglophone community. Even the famous Montmorency Falls, a favourite spot for outings, were merely a stage set. The novel begins as the first-person narrator, Lieutenant Alexander Macrorie, explains that the hero of his story will be his best friend, Jack Randolph what could be more ironically Canadian than this? These junior British officers in the 129th Bobtail Regiment are likeable and good looking but certainly not heroic, even though Macrorie performs a daring feat. We can almost anticipate what will happen because the plot of The Lady of the Ice harkens back to early Roman comedy, in which boy meets girl, boy almost loses girl (and best friend) through mistaking appearance for truth, until the resolution offers the possibility of a better society centring on the protagonists and their spouses. The pleasure is in seeing how De Mille entertains with his parodies of conventional plots, his gentle satire and his linguistic virtuosity. De Mille gives us an exciting description of a rescue on the ice floes of the St. Lawrence River. The potentially tragic duel in Chapter 31 is a sendup of fictional duels, in which De Mille ridicules outmoded codes of honour. The Fenian attack on Canadian soil after the American Civil War, one of the few contemporary allusions, is treated humorously. More than once De Mille employs a post-modernist technique always a tool of the comic writer when Macrorie reminds us this is not a novel, or, as
