[In the following essay, Verduyn examines Engel's private notebooks, or cahiers, to determine their significance to écriture féminine.]

First thought: I am hooked on orthodoxy. Kosherdom classicism. Have to learn to accept that a lot of the good things are like me, somewhat between the lines.

I am autobiographical … I am told my novels are … But my own history is the history of hundreds of people I know.

Marian Engel¹

An important accomplishment of recent literary criticism has been its revision of what can be considered a literary text. Modern critical movements such as feminism and postmodernism have been instrumental in legitimizing forms of literary expression that fall outside familiar genre categories such as the novel or poetry. Analysis of the relation between genre and gender in particular has resulted in an expansion of the literary canon to include forms of writing that frequently, though not exclusively, have been practised by women. Such revision has had particularly interesting results in the field of Canadian literature. Canonical revision has established the importance of work by numerous women writers who chose alternative literary practices. For example, at the end of the nineteenth century, Quebec writer Laure Conan problematized the dominant literary mode of the historical novel with her book Angéline de Montbrun. Incorporating letters, journal, and narrative, Conan's novel has become known as Canada's first psychological novel and its complexities continue to be revealed by modern criticism.² Another Quebec woman writer, Jovette-Alice Bernier, took the exploration of the psychological novel a step further with her controversial La Chair décevante, published in 1931. Unlike the then dominant ‘roman du terroir,’ Bernier's novel recounted in journal form the story of unwed mother Didi Lantange's struggle with societal pressures. Expanding the canon has also reinstated the work of English-Canadian women writers such as Anna Jameson, Laura Goodman Salverson, Lily Dougall, and Marjorie Pickthall, among others.³ The new literary terrain now includes travel writing, letters, diaries and other private papers, oral history and narrative, fiction-theory (represented by the work of Nicole Brossard),⁴ and the more recently identified category of ‘life writing.’ This last category is especially intriguing, as exemplified in the notebooks and cahiers of writers such as Marian Engel.

In an essay entitled ‘Whose Life Is It Anyway? Some Preliminary Remarks on Life-Writing,’ Marlene Kadar describes life writing as a ‘genre of documents or fragments of documents written out of a life, or unabashedly out of a personal experience of the writer’ (Essays in Life-Writing 5). Life writing comprises many kinds of texts, both fictional and non-fictional. All are linked by a common thematic concern with a life, or the self. While life writing may include some of the elements of the more familiar genre of autobiography, it steps beyond genre boundaries and disciplines, particularly with regard to narrative unity, ‘objective’ thinking, and author/ity. As Kadar explains, life writing performs two serious intellectual and cultural tasks: ‘First, it allows the canonical, or marginally canonical, to be considered alongside the legitimately marginal … The second important cultural task that Life-writing performs is related to gender. [Life-writing] is concerned with the documentation and reconstruction of women's lives … Women have found it easier to write in their lives, for one, and for another, they have not always written, or spoken, in a language or style which suited the judges of good taste.’ (13-14). Kadar identifies the culmination of life writing in ‘its combination of feminism and narrative, fictional or non-fictional, in what has come to be known as Ecriture féminine, often translated … as writing-in-the-feminine’ (16). A key concept in recent feminist literary criticism, ‘l'écriture au féminin’ is linked to the equally important concept of ‘jouissance.’ Simultaneously sexual, political, and economic in its overtones, as Kadar explains, ‘jouissance’ implies ‘total access, total participation, as well as total ecstasy’ (16). It is the result of writing that, in the words of French theoreticians Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, ‘undermines notions of representation and truth which hold that there is some original presence, some source of truth that can be restored to the text.’⁵

There have been a number of empirical demonstrations of the concept of life writing:⁶ the court testimonies of non-élite young women in early seventeenth-century Rome describing their loss of virginity; the work of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, who wrote at the end of the seventeenth century; and the journals of Elizabeth Smart, which span the decades of the mid-twentieth century. There are additional writings that illustrate the notion of life writing, as the present volume reveals. Among these are the notebooks Marian Engel kept throughout her life.

Marian Engel (1933-85) belonged to the generation of women writers in Canada who came to prominence during the 1970s. Mother of twins, first president of the Canadian Writers' Union, Engel published seven novels, two collections of short stories, two children's books, and numerous other short stories, essays, and articles.⁷ Her novel Bear won the 1976 Governor General's Award for best English-language fiction. But Engel's oeuvre is arguably more than her published novels and short stories. It comprises as well a variety of writings contained in the author's papers, including the notebooks or cahiers (the terms are interchangeable for her) that she wrote throughout her life. The Marian Engel Archive, the collection of the author's papers located at McMaster University Mills Memorial Library, comprises nearly thirty of her cahiers.

In the brochure describing Engel's McMaster papers, archivist Dr K. E. Garay notes:

Marian Engel ha[d] a Gallic Passion for the cahier, and early in her career acquired the habit of recording ideas, notes on books read, drafts of letters never sent, plot outlines and many other things in her notebooks. While some notebooks relate entirely to a particular novel (e.g. the Monodromos cahiers) others seem to have no relation to any novel or relate to several. Few of the notebooks contain dates and … to complicate matters somewhat, early notebooks containing blank pages were sometimes ‘rediscovered’ and include much later entries by the author.

(MEA [Marian Engel Archive] 34)

Engel's notebooks should be considered seriously in the first instance for their obvious link to her published work. The complete genesis and evolution of the novel Monodromos, for example, can be traced through the author's notebooks and papers.⁸ The same can be said of Bear. In some instances, texts undergo considerable subsequent revision; in others, passages remain virtually unaltered. In all cases, fiction writing coincides with other writings, ranging from personal introspection through financial accounts to recipes. The effect is to break down the traditional separation of fiction from other forms of writing. Engel's notebooks thus complete the tasks of life writing Kadar identifies in her essay. First, they unite the canonical and the marginal by interspersing passages of subsequently published novels or short stories with fragments of other writings produced by the author during her lifetime. And second, they document Engel's life as a woman and as a writer.

As Marlene Kadar explains, life writing is a genre practised most often, though not exclusively, in this century by women writers who ‘are caring for women's bios [‘life, course or way of living’], women's aute [authority and originality], women's graphia [signs], women's hermeneutics' (18). The highest goal of this newly identified ‘genre,’ Kadar proposes, is ‘self-knowing,’ which is linked to a notion of self-care’ (17). Engel's cahiers reflect this goal of life writing while exhibiting its generic traits. A notebook embargoed until after the author's death stands as witness to the difficult acknowledgment of self turning ‘human … becoming a person … taking care of myself’ (MEA 6:28).⁹ Engel's cahiers fill in ‘between the lines’ of Engel's published work. They provide a unique expression of the concerns and themes that shaped her life and informed her writing. Foremost among the ideas recurring in the notebooks is the experience of the writer as woman, and woman as writer or, more generally, artist. Other recurrent ideas include the obstacles presented to the woman writer, among them familial and societal stereotypes about women; literary theory and criticism; literary innovation; and the relation of reality and imagination, fact, and fiction. These recurring ideas will be explored briefly in the remainder of this essay.

One of the most clearly articulated themes in Engel's notebooks is her desire and determination to be a writer. ‘I decided to be a writer when I was 10. I bought a notebook and said, “I'm going to be a writer, Mother.” And she said, “That's very hard.” I said, “I don't care”’ (‘Beginnings’). This recollection of the early decision to become a writer identifies some significant elements that lend shape to Engel's experiences as a writer: the presence, from the outset, of the notebook; the role of the mother, and by extension, the family; and the hardships to be faced by the writer. Engel's determination to be a writer was matched by her awareness of the difficulties involved in being a writer, more specifically, being a woman writer in Canada in the 1960s. In one entry, she equated the notebook with ‘the knowing that you will not be understood because you are not big enough to say what you want’ (MEA 6:3).

Feeling ‘small’ derived from a combination of factors.¹⁰ Most important were the fact of being female, the way in which this was understood by family and society, and how this understanding was realized through social values and upbringing. Engel reflected regularly on the subject of upbringing in her notebooks and all her major fictional characters grapple with the question of how they were raised. ‘The years from five to ten are influential ones,’ Engel observed in an essay recalling her childhood in Galt, Ontario (‘The Girl from Galt’). As she explored her upbringing, Engel interrogated the values it was intended to instill as well as the role played by family figures—particularly the mother.

The mother figure is important in Engel's novels and short stories and a key presence in her notebooks and letters. This feature of her writing is particularly interesting in light of recent feminist critique that has undertaken to measure the extent to which the mother-daughter relationship shapes women's lives and work. In literature, relationships between father and son, or between lovers, have often eclipsed the relationship between mother and daughter. Engel consciously chose to write about the relations between mothers and daughters, and between women in general, thereby situating herself among the increasing number of women writers who privilege these previously neglected relationships.

The notebooks explore the closely related role of the family, and exhibit an ambivalent attitude. On the one hand, family is presented as providing a sense of belonging, a feeling important to the author and her characters alike. ‘I am not naturally a rebel,’ Engel recorded; ‘I want desperately to belong when there is something around to belong to’ (MEA 6:3). On the other hand, family was seen by Engel as potentially stifling female self-expression, particularly when its values are steeped in stereotypical attitudes towards women. ‘What are the values?’ Engel queried in notes to an early unpublished play ‘The Deception of the Thrush.’ In answer she wrote: ‘Family solidarity, feminine modesty, feminine chastity, feminine obedience’ (MEA 6:3). Engel's notebooks disclose a keen awareness of what she identified as southern Ontario, middle-class puritanism. She equated the state of ‘middle-classness’ with decorum, conventionality, and doing as one should:

Should? Isn't that the great Canadian word, though? It's hassled me all through my life, through school and Sunday School and a Baptist university, which I thought was about books and turned out to be about people hanging in your doorway saying Marian, you shouldn't hang about with those people who read so much, you should curl your hair.

Should, should, should, until you think you're going to die of it.

(‘Housework Gives Me the Crazies’)

In her notebooks, as elsewhere, Engel pursued the matter of ‘should’ and its various agents—notably family and formal education—and the generally negative impact it exerted on different areas of her growth from girlhood to womanhood. With regard to human sexuality, for instance, Engel observed: ‘I was brought up to be a nice, refined, Ontario girl … I was Miss Square, and, having been handed ‘Sex, Marriage and Birth Control’ at a tender age, I decided it was just as well. Besides, I wanted to be a writer’ (MEA 26:13). Becoming a writer did not ensure that questions of sex, marriage, and motherhood would not present themselves. On the contrary, and they are taken up at length in Engel's notebooks.

‘Relying on sex only drives one into frantic self-disgust,’ Engel wrote in an earlier cahier. ‘Denial, on the other hand, eventually distorts one's whole life’ (MEA 6:3). Sex is first in a list of ‘embarrassments’ that Engel identified in a 1963 notebook, a list that includes writing, religion, adoption (MEA 6:7). If matters such as sex, writing, and religion were awkward, it was at least in part because Engel's upbringing located them in the realm of instinct as opposed to the terrain of logic and control.

Engel explored the ostensible antithesis of logic and instinct, particularly as it related to writing, where feelings were perceived to play a critical role. ‘Never mind what the story says,’ Engel jotted in one cahier; ‘it proves that the instincts are right’ (MEA 6:1). But when instinct was linked to ‘femaleness,’ Engel as writer and woman experienced insecurity on both accounts. A 1963 notebook entry recorded this, and its unhappy consequences:

I am on the defensive about being a woman.

I am on the defensive about my own illogical (i.e. emotional) attitudes.

…

1) I drink more and more

2) I am less and less logical

3) I am less and less sure of which level things come from: hysteria.

(MEA 6:3)

As she was setting out on a career as a writer, Engel's notebooks reveal that she experienced the sort of distress that feminist investigation suggests is characteristic of the lives of women artists.¹¹ When emotion/instinct assert importance within a context of logic/control, hysteria is the verdict assigned by both the individual and society. Engel highly valued instinct and emotion in writing. She considered novelists synthesists rather than analysts: ‘The operation of the creative mind is one of synthesis, and the operation of the critical mind is analytic. The synthesizing process happens first: the novelist writes his first draft. Then the critical sense takes over. I trust my unconscious more and more’ (Matyas, ‘Interview with Marian Engel’). When writing was going well, the overwhelming sense was one of ‘disobeying orders—living instinctively instead of logically … riding high’ (MEA 6:10). But the belief in approaching reality through synthesis, instinct, and emotion was subject to constant challenge. ‘What was it taught me not to trust my own instinct & rationality?’ Engel queried in one cahier and in partial response, wrote: ‘pain, self-sacrifice, & instruction [of] the female virtues … led to their logical conclusion—destruction of the self and of other women's selves’ (MEA 6:28).

The traditional options for women, the ones that should be chosen, were consistently restrictive. It was always the case for Engel that ‘respectable was … the key word, rather than intellectual. That was beaten into me’ (MEA 26:12). As one notebook entry stated, ‘Gentility became the aim, “no thing stronger than tea” a whole philosophy’ (MEA 6:10). But the world of emotion and imagination, of writing and intellectual pursuit emerged against this background of respectability, gentility, and logic.

The notebooks confirm that Engel read widely and critically. Literary theory was an important lifelong interest. ‘I want to work out an aesthetic [of writing],’ she noted on 25 August 1972 (MEA 6:22). It was also an expertise shaped by her studies at McMaster and McGill. The cahiers contain notes taken in class and lists of books read during her university years. After Engel left university, she remained interested in the intellectual questions of the day. For example, she took copious notes on the theory and practice of the nouveau roman. An entry dated 30 January 1970 urges: ‘The Nouveau Roman, the Old Roman & the New Roman. Straighten out your ideas before you continue’ (MEA 6:18). Engel tracked the development of the idea of art becoming its own subject and the role of language in this new self-conscious representation. Reading Maurice Blanchot's Le Livre à venir, she noted that a ‘special lit.[erary] language [is] now being created in America’ (MEA 6:24). She was taken with Borges's concept of fabulation: ‘He says a great deal to me,’ she recorded. ‘His parables deal w[ith] what one can refer to as ‘artistic creation’—or creation or discovery. His labyrinths are tunnels for seekers—and writers are par excellence seekers (if I can't find it, I'll invent it)’ (MEA 6:18). She argued on paper with Robbe-Grillet about the ‘myth of depth’ and the need to see things as they are: ‘He may be right but what I need is to place the rare joys of reality against those few elements of reality that seep through to me’ (MEA 6:18). She devoted considerable attention to the demise of literary realism, recording under a notebook title ‘Butor—Repertoire II,’ that ‘realism is hostile to morality & the intellectual. It is made of mediocrity, hate, flat sufficiency’ (MEA 6:22).

As she rehearsed and reflected on literary process and criticism, Engel remained intently interested in innovation. However, the options available to her were conjuncturally limited. A writer intent on publishing at the time Engel was beginning her career could not be innovative in the ways subsequently facilitated by feminist literary practice or embraced by the concept of life writing. Although she tried (and even published) poetry, Engel was soon aware that this would not be her literary métier. ‘I wrote poetry when I was in my early twenties … then I had a run-in with Louis Dudek at McGill, who didn't like my work. I stopped writing poetry and realized that if I could stop, I was no poet’ (Matyas, ‘Interview with Marian Engel’).

Plays presented another option. Engel's unpublished work features a number of plays that Hugh MacLennan thought were good. McLennan was Engel's mentor at McGill, where he directed her MA thesis on the Canadian novel.¹² MacLennan remarked that an early Engel piece entitled ‘Beat Up the Rain’ was ‘true, vivid, vital and excellently constructed … the work … of a very observant writer who has produced some real if naive characters, thrown them together and made them live.’¹³ But Engel did not pursue playwriting past the period after her return from Europe in the mid 1960s, when she wrote radio and television plays and scripts. Instead, she turned to the novel, which offered her the possibilities for innovation and the room for ‘looseness’ that she required for literary expression. ‘I want to cut the novel up,’ a notebook entry recorded, ‘cut loose from conventional plod [sic]’ (MEA 6:24).

The notebooks provided an excellent outlet for this impulse. ‘Writing in so many notebooks,’ Engel noted on 4 June 1965 (MEA 6:10), ‘as ever, disorganized.’ This admission is not a self-criticism. Engel's writing shows respect for attitudes and modes of being subsequently legitimized by the contemporary cultural critiques of feminism and postmodernism. Reading Maurois's life of Balzac in 1966, she noted her admiration for ‘the multiplicity of the man. The love of the chaos hugger-mugger. Junkshop or splendid museum of a mind? Versailles and Highgate Cemetery. Means of knowing people—profilic intimacy. How many people's stories do I know this way?’ (MEA 6:11). Engel perceived simultaneousness and multiplicity as ways to realize intimacy with others and self alike. Apparent chaos can generate self-knowledge. ‘Fragmented is the word for my mind,’ Engel recorded on 30 August 1968 (MEA 6:13). Similar perceptions and reflections appear throughout the notebooks, as well as via the female protagonists of Engel's novels and short stories. Reading Harold Nicolson on 10 October 1968, Engel noted: ‘I must keep a diary, keep it regularly as an act of self-discipline and labour and sanity.’ But, she added knowingly, ‘my pen will run out. Always I fight against the grain of my upbringing’ (MEA 6:13).

At the time Engel was beginning to publish, literary unconventionality was a difficult project to pursue. Feminist and postmodern critiques had not yet facilitated rebel perspectives in the realms of social values and human expression. The cahiers offered a solution, but publishing a notebook was an idea whose time had not yet come.¹⁴ In the interim, the notion was subsumed in Engel's first published book, a novel called, not coincidentally, Sarah Bastard's Notebook.¹⁵

The idea of the ‘novel as notebook’ may not originate with Engel's Sarah Bastard's Notebook, but the latter was a ‘novel’ publication. This first book brought its author public attention in Canada, albeit not for the notebook aspect. This analytical lacuna reflected the absence of critical literary applications sensitive to alternative (female) approaches to representing experience. As a fuller critical context has emerged, Sarah Bastard's Notebook, like the cahiers that preceeded and followed it, can be considered to anticipate modern experimentation with literary form and representation. Engel's notebooks certainly provided her a vehicle of expression for concerns and practices of writing that modern and feminist criticism have subsequently validated. Among these are the departure from linear narrative and the clear separation of genres. The cahiers display little concern for chronology and sequence and present a blend of writing practices: fiction, theory, introspection, autobiography, and so forth. The overall effect is to blur the margins of ‘reality’ and fiction.

In her notebooks, Engel returned several times to the ‘dilemma’ of ‘where fiction begins and reality leaves off and the synthesizing of these two’ (‘Canadian Writing Today’). She expressed the view that writers cannot live on the theorizing plane alone: ‘We write out of another piece of ourselves which we hope to make universal, out of reality. And that is not to say that fiction is not reality, but it is not to say that fiction is reality either’ (‘Canadian Writing Today’). Engel's reflections on the relationship between reality and fiction can be juxtaposed fruitfully with those of Quebec feminist writer and theoretician Nicole Brossard. In her 1985 collection of essays La lettre aérienne Brossard asserts: ‘For most women “reality” has been a fiction, that is to say the product of an imagination that is not theirs and to which they cannot really adapt. Let's name some fictions: the military, the rise in the price of gold, the news, pornography … At the same time, one can also say that women's reality has been perceived as fiction. Let's name some realities here: maternity, rape, prostitution, chronic fatigue, violence (verbal, physical and mental’ (75). Brossard probes the ostensible realities and fictions generated by the dominant understanding of the world. She undermines the authority of those named within a maleoriented order, and privileges those identified within a more female-focused order. Her work punctures the structures and fictions of male-shaped reality to allow a new female reality to emerge and be expressed. Engel was engaged in a similar project. She also doubted the existence of one, unified Truth and challenged the distinction between fiction and ‘reality’ in her notebooks. ‘The truth lies,’ Engel jotted in a 1968 cahier; ‘the truth lies somewhere between’ (MEA 6:7). Engel did not suggest that truth is to be found in fiction. Of Monodromos she noted: ‘Without wanting to say “what is truth?” I want in Monodromos to depict but differently … But also to admit failure in the end’ (MEA 6:22). For Engel, the ‘necessities of fiction’ left no room for ‘literal truth,’ in which she was not interested (‘Do You Use Real People in Fiction?’). Rather, Engel was concerned with that which lies ‘between the lines.’

Engel's notebooks trace her life as a woman and a writer, detailing the points of tension between the poles of daily reality and imaginary life and writing. This tension characterizes her life and her oeuvre alike. Pages of notes on literary theory and reflections on intellectual life are offset by vignettes recording everyday ‘real life.’ Dozens of undated entries, both fictional and philosophical, sit beside equally numerous entries carefully noting time and place and conscientiously outlining the contours of ‘reality.’¹⁶ To read Engel's notebooks is to shift constantly with the author from a commitment to a life of the imagination and writing to a commitment to the here and now—reality as presented in a given time and place. Even as she was attracted to the world of the imagination, Engel was aware of the practical consequences of that attraction—at least for the woman writer. For example, there was the tendency to lose track of time and to forget about such domestic tasks as housekeeping: ‘Like Virginia Woolf, I have a wonderful gift for not seeing dust’ (‘Housework Gives Me the Crazies’). In addition, there was the appearance of inactivity and passivity, at odds with any work ethic. ‘For me thinking = action,’ Engel noted; ‘No wonder I'm static. Imagination stronger in effect than action … confronted with action, I fade into dreams’ (MEA 6:7). ‘Urgency kills me’ (MEA 6:11).

If she maintained the value of dream and imagination, writing and fiction, Engel always remained grounded in ‘reality’—a reality that in turn was grounded in female experience. This is what the notebooks record. In them, fiction writing converges with writing that conveys life as Engel—a woman and a writer—experienced it. In this way, the notebooks constitute the writings of a life—Marian Engel's life writing.

Notes

1. The first citation is found in papers described as ‘jottings, ideas, introspection, 1960's to 1980's, transcript, 5 pp. holograph 8 pp.’ and located in Box 26 File 45 in the Marian Engel Archive. The second citation is taken from a carbon typescript entitled ‘The Greening of Toronto: A Footnote to Mordecai Richler (13p),’ located in Archive Box 26 File 12. Compiled by Dr K. E. Garay, with the assistance of Norma Smith, the Marian Engel Archive is an issue of the Library Research News, a publication of the Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University. With her permission, this essay uses the brief descriptions Dr Garay provides to identify Engel's papers, otherwise organized under Box and File numbers. Most citations are from files in Box 6, which contains the author's notebooks and cahiers. Following are the descriptions of files cited in this essay:

   Box 6 File 1 (MEA 6:1): [1962-3] ‘I,’ Cyprus and Toronto: mostly notes for a planned novel [Sarah Bastard?] and a reading list.

   Box 6 File 3 (MEA 6:3): [1962-3] ‘Tome IV,’ Cyprus: ideas, outlines, introspection, lists of books.

   Box 6 File 7 (MEA 6:7): [1963] ‘II.’ Monodromos.' This cahier appears to have been kept as a journal in Cyprus and later used as one source of Monodromos.

   Box 6 File 10 (MEA 6:10): [1965?] This notebook begins more like a journal, April - June [1965?], mentions the finishing of Death Comes for the Yaya, then includes notes on books read, ideas for Sarah Bastard, and a ‘bibliography of the 20's’ on last page. It includes also three visiting cards from Cyprus.

   Box 6 File 11 (MEA 6:11): 1966-8 ‘Passmores and Minn.’ Notebook begins with notes on a Passmore ancestor but most of the cahier is taken up with notes on Minn [for The Honeyman Festival]. There are also journal entries, an account of the launching of No Clouds of Glory [1968], lists of names and notes on books read. Includes newspaper cutting.

   Box 6 File 13 (MEA 6:13): 1967 ‘Minn.’ Almost entirely notes and draft passages for The Honeyman Festival with some journal entries and lists.

   Box 6 File 18 (MEA 6:18): 1970 ‘Monodromos 1st’: outlines, lists, ideas, draft paragraphs and ‘notes from letters’—all for Monodromos. Also notes on books read and ideas on women's liberation.

   Box 6 File 22 (MEA 6:22): ‘Aug. 25/72: Holstein Book.’ Ideas and lists for Monodromos, notes on books read and ‘the poetry of the novel.’ Only 6 pp. of the cahier are written on.

   Box 6 File 24 (MEA 6:24): 1972-3 Notes for Monodromos, lists of names of places, people, flowers, etc., notes on books read, ideas and paragraphs for Ziggy short story.

   Box 6 File 28 (MEA 6:28): 1974 This notebook, containing notes relating to the Marshallene character, to Monodromos, and to Bear as well as journal entries, [was] embargoed for five years [i.e., until Spring 1988].

   Box 26 File 12 (MEA 26:12): ‘The Greening of Toronto: A Footnote to Mordecai Richler,’ carbon typescript, 13 pp.

   Box 26 File 13 (MEA 26:13): ‘Growing Up at Forty: Or the Real Joanne’—incomplete annotated typescript, 24 pp. total.

2. See, for instance, Patricia Smart's analysis of Angéline de Montbrun in Ecrire dans la maison du père 41-86.

3. See essays in Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli, eds, A Mazing Space

4. Others may be cited, but Brossard has been at the forefront of this new mode of writing that overrides traditional genre distinction by merging fiction, essay, theory, autobiography, and so on.

5. Kadar, 16-17, quoting Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, intro. Sandra M. Gilbert, in Theory and History of Literature 24 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P 1986) 165-6.

6. See Essays in Life-Writing.

7. Engel's published books of fiction include Sarah Bastard's Notebook (No Clouds of Glory) (1968), The Honeyman Festival (1970), Monodromos (1973), Inside the Easter Egg (1975), Joanne (1975), Bear (1976), The Glassy Sea (1978), Lunatic Villas (1981), The Tatooed Woman (1985). In addition, there are two children's books: Adventure at Moon Bay Towers (1974) and My Name is Not Odessa Yarker (1977); and a book entitled The Islands of Canada (1981, with J. A. Kraulis).

8. Monodromos exists in numerous drafts and multiple variations in the MEA. Garay notes that this novel appears to have been the most difficult one to write and certainly presented the most complex problems of archival arrangement (MEA x).

9. The underlined words in the quotation are Engel's emphasis.

10. The embargoed notebook (MEA 6:28) is especially revealing in this regard. In it, Engel records insights into her personality and her relationships with her husband, her mother, her children, her analyst, and her writing, achieved during a course of therapy in the mid-seventies.

11. See, for instance, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic.

12. Engel's MA thesis, ‘A study of the English-Canadian Novel Since 1939’ (144 pp., 1957), was one of the first critical examinations in the field of Canadian literary criticism.

13. Letter from McLennan to Engel dated 14 December 1959.

14. Now we do find ‘published notebooks’ among Canadian publishing-house selections. A recent example would be Antonio d'Alfonso's The Other Shore (Montreal: Guernica 1988).

15. Sarah Bastard's Notebook (Don Mills: Paperjacks 1974) was published earlier under the title No Clouds of Glory (Don Mills: Longmans 1968). The comment appears more than once in the author's papers that the book ought to have been issued only under the first title, that preferred by the author, and that which most effectively captures the book.

16. This is even more true of the many letters Marian Engel wrote, especially during her sojourn in Europe, and especially to her parents.

Works Cited

Bernier, Jovette-Alice. La Chair décevante. Montreal: Editions Albert Lévesque 1931

Brossard, Nicole. La lettre aérienne. Montreal: Remue-ménage 1985; The Aerial Letter. Trans. Marlene Wildeman. Toronto: Women's Press 1988

Conan, Laure. Angéline de Montbrun. Quebec: Léger Brousseau 1884

Engel, Marian. ‘Housework Gives Me the Crazies.’ Chatelaine (October 1973) 34:83-6

———. ‘Canadian Writing Today.’ Creative Literature in Canada Symposium, 2-9. Toronto: Ministry of Colleges and Universities 1974

———. ‘The Girl from Glat.’ Weekend Magazine 25.30 (26 July 1975): 6-7

———. ‘Do You Use Real People in Fiction?’ Saturday Night (November 1975): 6-7

Garay, K. E. The Marian Engel Archive. McMaster University, Archives and Research Collections 8, no. 2 (Fall 1984)

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale UP 1979

Kadar, Marlene, ed. Essays in Life-Writing. Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies Working Paper 89-WO3. North York, Ont.: York U 1989

Matyas, Cathy, and Jennifer Joiner. ‘Interpretation, Inspiration and the Irrevelant Question: Interview with Marian Engel.’ University of Toronto Review 5 (Spring 1981): 4-8

Neuman, Shirley, and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing. Edmonton: Longspoon-NeWest 1986

Smart, Patricia. Ecrire dans la maison du père: l'émergence du féminin dans la tradition littéraire du Québec. Montreal: Editions Québec/Amérique 1988. Translated by author: Writing in the Father's House. Toronto: U of Toronto P 1991