Arguments with the World

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 public voice of rhetorical essays requires the writer to argue with
the world. The private voice of the poet requires an argument with
oneself. These convictions of Kingston poet and storyteller Bronwen
Wallace are ably illustrated in essays that still retain the intimacy,
the attention to detail, and the sense of place that are caught in her
narrative verse.

Editor Joanne Page’s excellent foreword sums up the career and
literary characteristics of this committed feminist activist, who died
of cancer in 1989. The essays here first appeared as the column “In
Other Words” in The Whig-Standard (1987–89), where they gave voice
to the Kingston women’s community. In Page’s words, “Bronwen’s
voice resonates like a struck bell through the issues of her day, issues
still ours.”

Grouped into three large sections (“The Politics of Everyday,”
“The Family and Other Stories,” and “Arguments with Myself”),
the essays cover a broad range of topics, from battered women to
education and the art of telling stories. The voice is familiar and
colloquial, the eyes those of an intelligent and humane woman
passionately involved in her time and place. Arguments with the World
should be widely read and reread. Wallace said that she wrote from what
she was “given.” That given was distilled and transmitted with
clarity and force.