The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

This long, meticulously researched study of a writer who deserves to be
better known includes a 13-page chronology of Adele Wiseman’s
professional activities, a full page of her principal publications,
extensive endnotes, an 18-page bibliography that includes archival
collections and interviews, and a four-page index—not bad for a writer
best known for two novels, The Sacrifice (1956) and Crackpot (1974), her
masterpiece.

In the preface, Panofsky calls Wiseman (1928–92) “a seminal figure
in Canadian letters who, over the course of a lifetime, engaged with
other writers, literary agents, editors and publishers.” Readers who
know Wiseman simply as the author of two novels are in for a pleasant
surprise. Wiseman was born in 1928 in Winnipeg’s North End. She met
Margaret Laurence there in 1947, when Margaret and Jack Laurence moved
to a house opposite the Wisemans’ home. The two women, both aspiring
writers, quickly formed a friendship that would last for their
lifetimes.

By the early 1950s, Wiseman had visited London, England, joined the
Canadian Authors Association, and won substantial awards that enabled
her to write full-time. By the 1960s, she had a daughter and a literary
agent. A publishing offer came from Longmans Canada in 1970. A more
prestigious offer came from McClelland & Stewart; by 1978, Crackpot has
been added to their New Canadian Library Series, with an introduction by
Margaret Laurence. Wiseman’s last years were filled with honours and
public readings.

Ruth Panofsky teaches English at Toronto’s Ryerson University. She is
the author of Adele Wiseman: An Annotated Bibliography (1992) and
co-editor with John Lennox of Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and
Adele Wiseman (1997).