The Canadian Essay

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

The essay, a form much admired in past centuries and out of favor for
most of our own, is back in fashion. In English Canada, the form has a
venerable history, as these selections show.

From an embarrassment of riches over a hundred-year span, Ottawa
professors Lynch and Rampton have chosen 20 writers. Many of them are
represented by two essays. The women writers are Sara Jeannette Duncan
(the first woman reporter to work regularly at the Toronto Globe), Ethel
Wilson, Mavis Gallant, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Linda
Hutcheon. Male essayists include Stephen Leacock, Hugh MacLennan,
Marshall McLuhan, Robertson Davies, George Grant, and Al Purdy.

Most of the essays, whatever their vintage, remain alive thanks to the
intimacy that is possible when a writer knows his or her audience. As
MacLennan puts it in “The Writer and His Audience,” “the writer is
one of the most solitary of workers, but when he sits at his desk he
must feel that he is writing to friends.”

The Canadian Essay, with its lively and intelligent writing in short
format and on many topics, would make an excellent text for students in
universities or in senior high-school grades.