Marian Engel Biography

Canadian novelist and short-story writer, born in Toronto; Engel spent her early years in Ontario and attended the Universities of McMaster, where she studied modern languages, and McGill, before winning a scholarship to study French literature in Aix-en-Provence. She subsequently worked in London and Cyprus, a period of her life which provided the inspiration for her novel Monodromos (1973; reissued as One-Way Street, 1974), a study of a divorced Canadian woman's attempt to find a new identity on a Greek island. Engel was a student of Hugh MacLennan at McGill and her fiction has superficial affinities with the realist mode of MacLennan's writing, but in her best-known work, Bear (1976), she subverts the conventions of realism. The novel is centred on a woman's erotic relationship with a pet bear in the remote setting of the Lake Superior shoreline and suggests the liberating possibilities that both fantasy and the wilderness, usually presented as threatening in early Canadian writing, offer women. Engel also published No Clouds of Glory (1968), The Honeymoon Festival (1970), Joanne (1975), The Glassy Sea (1978), and two short story collections, Inside the Easter Egg (1975) and The Tattooed Woman (1985). She was the first Chairperson of the Writers' Union of Canada, which was founded in 1973.