SOURCE: Verduyn, Christl. “Between the Lines: Marian Engel's Cahiers and Notebooks.” In Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, edited by Marlene Kadar, pp. 28-41. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Verduyn examines Engel's private notebooks, or cahiers, to determine their significance to écriture féminine.

First thought: I am hooked on orthodoxy. Kosherdom classicism. Have to learn to accept that a lot of the good things are like me, somewhat between the lines.

I am autobiographical … I am told my novels are … But my own history is the history of hundreds of people I know.

Marian Engel¹

An important accomplishment of recent literary criticism has been its revision of what can be considered a literary text. Modern critical movements such as feminism and postmodernism have been instrumental in legitimizing forms of literary expression that fall outside familiar genre categories such as the...