In the following essay, McCarthy contends that Almeda chooses "marginality, rather than having it imposed upon her by the Victorian patriarchy."

Alice Munro's short story "Meneseteung," which Clare Tomalin has described as "the finest and most intense" (quoted by Redekop, Mother) of the stories collected in Friend of My Youth (1990), recounts a narrator's attempt to "see" someone in the past, and like a number of other contemporary fictions by Canadian women—for example, Carol Shields' Small Ceremonies (1976), Susan Swan's The Biggest Modern Woman in the World (1983), Jane Urquhart's The Whirlpool (1986) and Changing Heaven (1990), Katherine Govier's Between Men (1987) and Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic (1988)—seems to present such vision as an enabling precondition for living through the present; for in all these works, it is the historian, more than the history, who comes to matter, and the narrator, for whom the historical narrative is the way into...