UNB Alumni
Telling our #ProudlyUNB stories

At 94 years old, Virginia Bliss Bjerkelund (BA’51) has claimed the titles of storyteller and successful author.

But although she’s travelled extensively throughout the world and lived in the U.K. for a good portion of her life, it’s her ancestry and home in New Brunswick that captured her creative interest.

With the publishing of her second book in 2023 (her first was at the young age of 91), Virgina has brought to life the story of Elizabeth Robinson Scovil, or Aunt Bessie, as the author knew her. Elizabeth was a powerhouse in her time: she co-founded the Victorian Order of Nurses, wrote bestselling books on child health and parenting, was a founding editor of The Ladies Home Journal, The American Journal of Nursing and Canadian Nurse and was a founder of the National Council of Women of Canada.

Her accomplishments and wisdom are chronicled in Virginia’s book, A Nurse For All Seasons: Elizabeth Robinson Scovil 1849-1934, published by Woodstock's Chapel Street Editions.

Virginia remembers a visit from her great Aunt Bessie when she lived near Amherst, Nova Scotia in 1933 which her mother captured on her Box Brownie camera." 

“Bessie didn’t decide to go into nursing until the age of 29, when began training at a two-year program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Within a few years she became superintendent of nursing at the Newport General Hospital in Rhode Island. Her accomplishments were very impressive. She published over 20 books, wrote many papers and articles on nursing and spoke at conferences in the United States and later Canada. After Bessie sent two of her books on nursing children to Florence Nightingale, the famous heroine invited her to visit in England, which she did!”

It's fitting that Virginia is telling her great-aunt’s story. “I think my great aunt Bessie would have been pleased with my books about her, chiefly because it promotes the profession and history of nursing."

Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Virginia moved as a child with her mother to Fredericton where she attended Fredericton High School and then UNB. She caught the writing bug early on. “In the 1940’s, FHS didn’t have a newspaper, so I started one. And although I wasn’t on the academic track that led to university, an uncle encouraged me to attend and offered to pay tuition, so I attended UNB summer school so that I could be accepted to the Bachelor of Arts program.”

“There were 90 women attending UNB at that time,” she remembers. “I loved it, and put a lot of energy into extracurriculars, including writing for the Brunswickan and working on the yearbook. UNB changed my life.”

It was during her studies at UNB that Virginia became attached to a young English lecturer in Latin and Greek, one Ian Sutherland. He planned to return to England, in May, and Virginia had made arrangements to work in a psychiatric hospital in Scotland that summer so bought a ticket on the same ship. She was easily persuaded to change her summer job to a similar one in the city of Leicester in central England, where Ian's family lived. She eventually married and settled in England. Almost 30 years, two children and a divorce later, Virginia returned to Fredericton and married her one-time boyfriend who by now was the chairman of department of Forest Engineering at UNB, Tom Bjerkelund (BScF '49). She attended St. Thomas University to obtain a degree in social work, then practiced as a councillor and engaged heavily with the community. With Tom she travelled widely, including New Zealand, Pakistan, Scandinavia and on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Beijing.

“We were fortunate to see amazing places and experience wonderful new things. It was inspiring, and I wanted a creative outlet, so I eventually joined a local writing group. It was there that I began my journey to research and write down my family history and stories.”

Virigina "kind of grew up with Aunt Bessie" because she helped raise her mother, Mary Scovil. “My mother would always quote pearls of wisdom from Aunt Bessie, so I felt quite a kindred spirit with her. When I gained access to her writings and keepsakes through a relative in the U.S., she came alive again for me.”

Virgina says that she took nearly 10 years to research and write before publishing her first book, Meadowlands: A Chronicle of the Scovil Family, in which her great-aunt was introduced in the tale of her mother's family living on an island near Gagetown in the early 1900s. Now, in her new book, she has given us the rest of the story, shining a light on the significance of Elizabeth Robinson Scovil’s legacy – as a woman who strode out of the Victorian Era to open the way for the rise of gender equality as a fundamental human right.

“It was important and very satisfying to do this work. And my age was never a factor. My secret to healthy living is to walk every day, not eat meat and have something to look forward to daily. It’s never too late to put something new and valuable into the world.”