Marian Ruth Engel (née Passmore; May 24, 1933 – February 16, 1985) was a Canadian novelist and a founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada. Her most famous and controversial novel was Bear (1976), a tale of erotic love between an archivist and a bear.
Biography
Born May 24, 1933, in Toronto, Ontario, Engel lived the first years of her life in foster care before being adopted by Frederick Searle and Mary Elizabeth (Fletcher) Passmore. The family moved frequently and Engel spent time as a child in Port Arthur, Brantford, Galt, Hamilton and Sarnia.
After graduating from the Sarnia Collegiate Institute & Technical School, Engel obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Language Studies at McMaster University in 1955 and completed a Master of Arts in Canadian Literature at McGill University in 1957. In 1960 Engel was awarded a Rotary Foundation Scholarship and spent a year studying French Literature at the Université d'Aix-Marseille in Aix-en Provence, France. Instead of returning to Canada the following year, she worked in England as a translator and began working on the unpublished manuscript Women Travelling Alone. While raising her young family, Marian began to pursue a writing career. Marian and Howard separated in 1975 and divorced in 1977. From 1975-1977 she served on the City of Toronto Book Award Committee (an award she won in 1981 for Lunatic Villas
Writing
Marian Engel's first published novel, No Clouds of Glory, was published in 1968. Later reissued in the United States as Sarah Bastard's Notebook (1974), the work challenged traditional notions of female identity by using a fragmented approach to the subjective narrative that mirrored entries in a notebook. It won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction in 1976.
Inside the Easter Egg (1975) and her posthumous The Tattooed Woman (1985) were collections of short stories. Some of these short stories had originally been written for Robert Weaver's CBC radio program Anthology. from which she drew for her fiction. In 1999, this material was edited and published as Marian Engel's Notebook: 'Ah, mon cahier, écoute....
From 1965 to 1985 she corresponded with literary peers and friends such as Hugh MacLennan, Robertson Davies, Dennis Lee, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Matt Cohen, Robert Weaver, Graeme Gibson and more. Some of this correspondence can be found in Dear Hugh, Dear Marian: the MacLennan-Engel Correspondence (1995) and Marian Engel: Life in Letters (2004)
Themes
Engel's writing illustrated contemporary life with a focus on the day to day experiences of women.
Death
Engel died in Toronto, of cancer, on February 16, 1985. Writers, including Gwendolyn MacEwen, read during a memorial service in her honour co-ordinated by Timothy Findley at The Music Gallery on February 28. Elizabeth and the Golden City, the novel Engel was working on at the time of her death, was left unfinished. It was incorporated into Marion and the Major: Engel's Elizabeth and the Golden City by Christyl Verduyn and published in 2010.
After her death the Writer's Development Trust of Canada instituted the $10,000 Marian Engel Award, which was presented annually to a woman writer in mid-career. The award was prompted by Engel's friends and colleagues who established an endowment fund in her name to recognize significant literary achievement by female writers under the age of 45. The first contributor to the fund was Margaret Atwood.
Awards and honours
- Governor General's Award for English-language fiction (1976)
- Officer of the Order of Canada(1982)
- Toronto Book Award (1982)
- Toronto YWCA's Woman of Distinction in Arts (1984)
Selected works
Books
- No Clouds of Glory. 1968 (reissued as Sarah Bastard's Notebook in 1974)
- Islands of Canada (photographs by J. A. Kraulis). 1981
Articles
Posthumous publications
- Verduyn, Christl, ed. Dear Marian, Dear Hugh: The MacLennan-Engel Correspondence. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1995.
- Verduyn, Christl, ed. Marian Engel's Notebook: 'Ah, mon cahier, écoute.... Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1999.
- Verduyn, Christl and Kathleen Garay, eds. Marian Engel: Life in Letters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004
- Verduyn, Christl, Marian and the Major: Engel's Elizabeth and the Golden City Montreal-Kingston: McGill Queen's University Press, 2010.