Marian Engel's Notebooks: "Ah, mon cahier, ecoute"

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

Marian Engel is perhaps best known for her symbolic novel Bear. She was
a prolific novelist, letter writer, and diarist who expressed the hope,
shortly before she died of cancer in 1985, that people would read her
fiction rather than her papers. Both are well worth reading.

Editor Christl Verduyn is professor of Canadian Studies and Women’s
Studies at Trent University and the author of many studies on Canadian
writers. (She received the Gabrielle Roy Book Prize for Lifelines:
Marian Engel’s Writings.) In her 17-page introduction, she writes that
she was initially drawn to Engel’s fiction and only later found the
personal papers and notebooks to be not only a valuable complement to
the published work but also a significant contribution to the genre of
life writing.

The pieces in this book date from 1949 to 1985 and were selected from
more than 40 cahiers (Engel’s term) in the Marian Engel Archive at
McMaster University. Engel’s personal reflections are funny, moving,
perceptive, sometimes profound, and frighteningly honest. Shortly before
her death, she wrote: “I don’t trust all this kindness. It feels
terminal.”

This hefty volume is full of nuggets of insight for both writers and
readers.