Dear Marian, Dear Hugh: The MacLennan-Engel Correspondence

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Fate threw two lonely, exceptionally gifted people together at a
critical point in both their lives. It was not a relationship of equals,
as they were forced to recognize; but it became one. And for a brief
time, the correspondence was of central importance to each writer.

Dear Marian, Dear Hugh consists of 39 letters written by Hugh
MacLennan, between April 1956 and November 1984; five letters from
Marian Engel, written near the end of her life (Engel died of cancer in
1985 at the age of 51); two essays by Engel from the 1980s, one a
tribute to MacLennan on the occasion of the MacLennan Conference in
1982; and a long introduction—the latter piece alone being worth the
price of the book.

The book’s focus is on MacLennan’s letters from 1956 to 1966 (most
of Engel’s letters to MacLennan have not yet turned up), and within
this decade the period from 1956 to 1958, when Engel worked on and
completed her Master’s thesis on Canadian literature at McGill, under
MacLennan’s supervision, and MacLennan completed The Watch That Ends
the Night. For both writers these two years were critical; MacLennan’s
praise for Engel’s work, his comments on what writing involved, and
his warm encouragement meant everything to her. She developed what she
called, years later, “a monumental crush” on the older writer, only
to be reminded that he was twice her age.

In his letters, MacLennan writes of his novels, the work of other
Canadian novelists, the critics he admires or dislikes, and Engel’s
own commentary in her thesis. His fiction remains at the centre of the
postwar flowering of Canadian literature.

This slim but important book provides a unique commentary on Canadian
literature and a testimony to the human spirit.