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Phyllis Brett Young

Born

May 23, 1914

Died

November 27, 1996

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Also published under pseudonym Kendal Young

Phyllis Brett Young was an internationally bestselling Canadian novelist.

Born in Toronto, Young was the daughter of Marion and George Sidney Brett, the latter a noted philosopher who wrote the first English-language history of psychology. After some time studying interior decorating at the Ontario College of Art, she married her longtime sweetheart, Douglas Young, and became a wife and mother.

As her daughter Valerie would later explain, her mother was a “product of a culture in which married women only went to work under extreme circumstances.” It was not until Valerie was a teen, and her husband secured work for a branch of the UN in Geneva, that Young found the time to evolve beyond short stories Also published under pseudonym Kendal Young

Phyllis Brett Young was an internationally bestselling Canadian novelist.

Born in Toronto, Young was the daughter of Marion and George Sidney Brett, the latter a noted philosopher who wrote the first English-language history of psychology. After some time studying interior decorating at the Ontario College of Art, she married her longtime sweetheart, Douglas Young, and became a wife and mother.

As her daughter Valerie would later explain, her mother was a “product of a culture in which married women only went to work under extreme circumstances.” It was not until Valerie was a teen, and her husband secured work for a branch of the UN in Geneva, that Young found the time to evolve beyond short stories and write her first novel. Dinner-table discussions of nature versus nurture became Psyche, the story of a girl who struggles to find herself after being kidnapped from her wealthy parents and abandoned in a poor mining town. When Douglas urged her to submit the manuscript to publishers — something Phyllis was reluctant to do — her hobby become a career.

In just ten years (1959-1969), Phyllis Brett Young wrote four novels (Psyche, The Torontonians, Undine, and A Question of Judgment), a memoir about her summers in Muskoka (Anything Can Happen!), and a thriller experiment under the never-secret pseudonym Kendal Young (The Ravine). It was estimated that her first three books reached ten million readers throughout the world, making her one of the rare mid-century Canadian scribes to earn world recognition.

Young excelled at capturing the life of women between and beyond two World Wars, and her work spoke to mid-century womanhood before the rise of feminism. She was also a proud Canadian who strove to capture the cosmopolitan evolution of “Toronto the Good.” The Torontonians explored womanhood within a city caught between decorum, nationalism, and change, and Young fought against publishers who insisted that the novel lose its explicit Toronto-ness, dubbing it Gift of Time, The Gift of Time, and The Commuters. As she told the Ottawa Citizen, “I write because I love Canada and I wish more and more people would write about Canada as it is today.”

Ill health and familial obligations ended Young’s successful career. Never one for the spotlight, her work faded into obscurity. Phyllis Brett Young passed away in 1996, at the age of 82.

Eleven years later, the spotlight returned when McGill University posthumously republished two of her works, Psyche and The Torontonians.
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Phyllis Brett Young’s books

Average rating: 3.78 · 229 ratings · 29 reviews · 10 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Torontonians 3.77 avg rating — 190 ratings — published 1960 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Psyche by Phyllis Brett Young, Nathalie Cooke (Introduction), Suzanne Morton (Introduction) 3.95 avg rating — 20 ratings — published 1959 — 13 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Ravine by Kendal Young, Phyllis Brett Young 3.44 avg rating — 9 ratings — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Undine 4.17 avg rating — 6 ratings — published 1980 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Anything Could Happen! 3.50 avg rating — 2 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A question of judgment liked it 3.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 1970 — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Gift of Time 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Gift of Time 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Undine 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Undine 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Phyllis Brett Young (?)

“...the fact remains that, from the time when I could first walk until I adopted high heels, lipstick, and a pretence of helplessness, a muscle in the forearm was worth far more to me than any amount of brains in the head.”
― Phyllis Brett Young, Anything Could Happen!

tags: childhood, feminism, history, womens-history

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“Civilization, when it took you beyond the necessity to know how to snare a rabbit, moved you into an area where you fought for mental and moral survival. And whether or not you won this particular kind of battle depended to a great extent on where you fought it, and with what weapons. That is, if you fought at all. If you did anything beyond labelling yourself 'I, the victor'—while stripping cellophane from fresh-frozen rabbit beside a suburban barbecue.”
― Phyllis Brett Young, The Torontonians

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“Of course, you could not say that a community with a Loblaw's that supplied Shakespeare was entirely devoid of culture. But damn near. Damn near.”
― Phyllis Brett Young, The Torontonians

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