Marian Engel | Biography

Marian Engel is best known as the author of Bear, which won a Governor General's Award in 1977, but she has written extensively and memorably about urban life in southern Ontario and was also active in writers' causes.

Marian Passmore, the daughter of Frederick Searle and Mary Fletcher Passmore, was born in Toronto in 1933, but the family moved around southwestern Ontario, to Hamilton, Galt, Brantford, and Sarnia, because her father, a teacher of auto mechanics, had to find work wherever it could be had during the Depression. The moves gave her a keen sense of provincial life, with its Puritanism, its materialism, and its distrust of ideas and customs from "Yurp." After receiving her B.A. from McMaster University in 1955, she earned an M.A. from McGill, where her supervisor was Hugh MacLennan; he instilled in her a vital concern for prose style and taught her much about the craft of fiction. She was already writing steadily--her first published stories had appeared in Seventeen magazine--and she continued to write through years of teaching, study in France, and travel in Europe. She had met Howard Engel, a CBC radio producer, in Canada, but it was in England that they were married, in 1962. They lived for a time in Cyprus--"old yellow dog of an island," she has called it affectionately--before returning to Toronto in 1964. There the twins, William and Charlotte, were born.

Engel's first published novel, No Clouds of Glory!, appeared in 1968. Though the title which Engel preferred, Sarah Bastard's Notebook, was not used until the novel was republished in 1974, it focuses on the kind of character who was to be at the center of much of her fiction. Not literally a bastard, Sarah Porlock is nonetheless a descendant of Shakespeare's Edmund and Don John, a figure who is outside the social order, and who, "contrary and rambunctious" as Engel describes her, observes society with a sharp and often satirical eye. What sets her apart from society is not her birth but her inner life, "furtive, furious, internal, and private," and Engel's exploration of this life led the reviewers to class her with feminist writers.

Superficially Minn Burge, the central figure of The Honeyman Festival (1970), contrasts with Sarah Porlock, for Sarah is single, and Minn is married and pregnant. But she, too, has a "furtive, furious" inner life, and the reader is shown that life during the course of a single evening, when Minn's house is the scene of a party following a festival of Honeyman films--"the best-made crap of the period"--in which she had appeared. Like No Clouds of Glory!, this novel is set in Toronto. Engel contrasts that city and the Mediterranean world, but the difference is not the expected one of the ordinary and the romantic; both are treated ironically.

Engel was always fascinated with journeys to and from islands, and that pattern is central to Monodromos (1973), as it is to the children's story Adventure at Moon Bay Towers (1974), to her travel book The Islands of Canada (1981), and to Bear. In literary terms, the return journey is the quest of romance, and its inner psychological counterpart is the breakup and reintegration of the heroine's personality. In Monodromos , for instance, the journey is to a Mediterranean island much like Cyprus. At first, Audrey, the heroine, experiences intense happiness, but her relations with others become increasingly complicated, and the warmth of spring gives way to the heat of summer. Release comes with a trek into the mountains to see the icon of the dog-headed saint, "a memorial to all mixtures" and an emblem of Engel's fascination with the irrational. Engel never liked what she called the "easily encompassed," and much preferred the unexpected and the contradictory, because they seemed to her to mirror the multiplicity of actual experience. Perhaps no other writer in Canada has so fully celebrated the discovery--which Audrey makes in this book--that the world is a miscellany.

Engel was a founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada, and, as its first chairman in 1973-1974, campaigned for payment to authors on the basis of library circulation of their books. At the same time, she was writing articles, short stories (nineteen of the stories were collected in Inside the Easter Egg, 1975), and Joanne: The Last Days of a Modern Marriage (1975), a serial commissioned for CBC radio which takes the form of a diary of a woman whose marriage is breaking up.

It was with Bear (1976) that Engel became widely known both in Canada and abroad. "I'm only surprised at what a small, neat book it is," Engel said in a 1978 interview, and it is "small" and "neat" because the central patterns of her fiction are realized so perfectly in it. At the center here, as in the other novels, is a heroine with an intense inner life, and she, too, travels to an island, this time in Northern Ontario. She begins with a feeling of inner deprivation and fragmentation and ends with a sense of being reborn. The setting--the house on the island is "a classic Fowler's octagon"--symbolizes the psychological integration Lou is seeking, but it is a bear who is the agent of her renewal. He is "indubitably male," Lou sees, and, like his predecessors in the bestiaries, is a good lover. But Lou sometimes describes him as female, and he is constantly licking her, like the she-bear of the bestiaries who is thought to give her cubs life and shape with her tongue. The creature's creative and integrating powers become hers, paradoxically, when she attempts, and fails, to have intercourse with him.

To its first readers, Bear was daring, and also, as Margaret Atwood wrote, "plausible as kitchens." It was widely reviewed, praised, and attacked. Whether the reviews were good or bad hardly mattered, for the controversy brought attention to the novel, spurred sales, and encouraged the publisher to shift from the spartan format of the hardcover edition to the erotic cover of the Seal paperback edition published in 1977. In the United States influential reviews by Doris Grumbach (who called the novel "pure magic, an alchemic transformation from fact into folk tale") and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt helped account for the fact that the first American printing was sold out within a week.

"Writers' personal lives tend to be messy, and mine is no exception," Engel once wrote. While Bear was becoming a commercial success, the Engels separated and were divorced. In 1977-1978, she was writer in residence at the University of Alberta, and she stayed in Edmonton a second year to teach. There she finished The Glassy Sea (1978). It is the apologia of Rita Heber, who becomes an Eglantine nun and then wife, mother, and divorcée. In Rita, who describes herself as like both Mary and Martha, the active and contemplative lives are at first in conflict, and then uneasily integrated.

Engel returned to live in Toronto and was writer in residence at the University of Toronto in 1980-1981. The city's renovated townhouses are the setting of Lunatic Villas (1981), published in the United States as The Year of the Child. Harriet and her six children, who live in one of these townhouses, parody the families in books like Little Women and embody Engel's "love of overloaded systems." Harriet's household is made up of wards, children, relatives, and an English visitor named Mrs. Saxe, and Rathbone Place, the cul-de-sac where the townhouse is located, is home to an even more varied group of people. In such a random environment, Harriet finds bliss. Bear may be Engel's best-known novel, but Lunatic Villas is her most typical.

Engel died of cancer in Toronto in 1985. In the preface to The Tattooed Woman (1985), a collection of stories she prepared for publication before her death, she affirmed once again the value of the irrational in fiction, this time not as her subject, but as the creative force behind her work. "The best writing," she quotes Hugh MacLennan as saying, "comes from a well-rested subconscious."