Marian Engel

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.

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.

Her father taught auto mechanics, taking on positions at schools across southwestern Ontario.

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.

Her M.A. supervisor while at McGill was author Hugh MacLennan, whom she corresponded with until her death.

Engel taught briefly (1957–58) at The Study in Montreal, as well as at McGill University, the University of Montana-Missoula and St. John's School in Cyprus.

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Instead of returning to Canada the following year, she worked in England as a translator and began working on the unpublished manuscript Women Travelling Alone.

Engel met Howard Engel, a mystery novel writer and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio producer in Canada, and married him in England in 1962.

They returned to Toronto in 1964.

The couple had two children, twins William Lucas Passmore and Charlotte Helen Arabella.

While raising her young family, Marian began to pursue a writing career.

From 1965-1985 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.

Marian Engel's first published novel, No Clouds of Glory, was published in 1968.

She was the first chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, established in 1973, with early meetings taking place in her Toronto home.

In a 1974 Maclean's editorial Our Authors are Being Ripped Off, Engel outlined a vision for author compensation based on library circulation statistics.

She argued that authors are expected "to live off that vapourous substance "prestige"" and suggested that the uncompensated use of Canadian writers' work is a violation of copyright.

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.

In addition to her novels, Engel wrote two children's books; Adventures of Moon Bay Towers (1974) and My name is not Odessa Yarker (1977).

Engel was an avid journal keeper and she used them primarily as a repository for memories and details from which she drew for her fiction.

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 ) and the Canadian Book and Periodical Development Council.

Engel was a passionate activist for the rights of Canadian writers on the national and international stage.

Engel also helped instigate the Public Lending Right Commission as a trustee on the Toronto Public Library Board from 1975-1978.

Pensions for writers and royalties from library loans were two of the issues Engel championed.

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.

The novel JOANNE: The Last Days of a Modern Marriage was originally commissioned as a radio-novel by CBC for the program This Country in the Morning.

Her most famous and controversial novel was Bear (1976), a tale of erotic love between an archivist and a bear.

Engel's most famous and controversial novel was Bear (1976), a tale of erotic love between an archivist and a bear.

Her editor at Harcourt Brace rejected the manuscript noting that: "Its relative brevity coupled with its extreme strangeness presents, I'm afraid, an insuperable obstacle in present circumstances."

It was eventually published by McClelland & Stewart after being championed by Robertson Davies.

It won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction in 1976.

Engel was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta from 1977 to 1978 and served the same role at the University of Toronto from 1980 to 1982.

Some of this correspondence can be found in Dear Hugh, Dear Marian: the MacLennan-Engel Correspondence (1995) and Marian Engel: Life in Letters (2004)

Engel's writing illustrated contemporary life with a focus on the day to day experiences of women.

She described her work as an exploration of "how you deal with an imperfect world when you have been brought up to look for perfection."

The relationships between mothers and daughters, rooted in explorations of identify formation and subjective experiences, were a common theme.

In 1999, this material was edited and published as Marian Engel's Notebook: 'Ah, mon cahier, écoute...'.