Marian Engel: Life in Letters

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Before 1960, English Canada did not have much of a literature. The
country was still very young, and perhaps at that point too dependent on
Britain to have an established sense of its own identity. As Canada’s
100th birthday drew nearer, though, Canadians began to look in the
cultural mirror and take stock. Canada created its own flag and its own
national anthem, and developed its own artistic emblems. Writers across
the country thought long and hard about who we were as a people, and it
was this climate that fostered the literary development of Marian Engel.


Appalled at the difficulties English-Canadian writers faced in their
own country, Engel became a crusader. She maintained that writing was a
hard life all over the world, but especially in Canada, where writers
were perhaps worse off financially than anywhere else in the
English-speaking world. She took action. In her fight for fair pay and
terms, for example, she admonished Chatelaine that “Nobody, not even
housewives, should sell world rights” and sent back their cheque.
Moreover, she had an interesting, if confrontational, relationship with
publishing houses all over Canada, demanding that they take greater
risks with highly artistic novels and compensate authors properly for
their works. When her unorthodox novel Bear proved to be a success,
Engel paved the way for other experimental fiction to find homes with
Canadian publishers. In fact, she intended for her gains to become
standard for all writers across Canada, and to this end she spearheaded
the Writers’ Union.

Marian Engel: Life in Letters reveals more about the development of a
Canadian literary collective than it does about the author herself.
Engel’s personality, of course, permeates the tone and style of her
correspondence, but the letters aren’t really about Engel herself. The
reader will not come away any wiser where Engel’s crumbling marriage
or her diagnosis with cancer are concerned. Instead, the letters show
the relationship between key authors in this new Canadian literary world
who banded together to gain greater respect and a better chance at a
decent livelihood.