SOURCE: Verduyn, Christl. “Translated without Transubstantiation: The Glassy Sea.” In Lifelines: Marian Engel's Writings, pp. 138-61. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Verduyn discusses the dichotomy in women's lives between life and letters as explored by Engel in The Glassy Sea.

I was going to have to turn human again so I could think.

Marian Engel, Joanne¹

There were Marys and Marthas and I knew which kind I was.

Marian Engel, Joanne²

Ruthie had never told a lie, but “oh,” she moaned to the principal, “I had to sit on the toilet, my mother made me sit on the toilet, I'm constipated, I had to sit on the toilet.” Whereas she had been outside the foundry watching them pull pigs of iron out of furnaces on red-hot rods, flying in devils' horns around her.

The lie grew and grew inside her. It is not...