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When Ethel Wilson published her first novel,Hetty Dorval, she was in her sixtieth year. With her subsequent books, among them the widely readSwamp Angel(1954), she established herself as one of Canada's most important writers. Although she fostered a reputation for being an unambitious latecomer, a happily married doctor's wife who wrote for her own pleasure, she in fact took her writing very seriously, trying for several years to place her work with major American publishers. David Stouck's engaging biography of this elusive Canadian writer draws on archival material and interviews to describe, in detail, her early life as an orphan in England and Vancouver and her long writer's apprenticeship, spanning from the publication of some children's stories in 1919 to the appearance ofHetty Dorvalin 1947. Stouck's narrative charts the resistance among publishers, critics, and readers to the curious mixture in her work of an Edwardian sensibility and a postmodern intelligence. He also documents her own resistance to both literary nationalism and creative writing classes as strategies for promoting literature. She was nevertheless one of the few Canadian women writers to emerge from the 1950s, and she is still being read - all her books remaining in print. Stouck observes that Wilson's writing is marked by epistemological and ethical uncertainties that are rooted in the contingencies of language, because, as Wilson herself liked to quote from Lewis Carroll, the 'meaning [of words] depends on who is the master.'Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biographyis the story of a distinguished writer whose works are rightly considered classics of Canadian literature.

The Sierra Leone civil war, which spanned from 1991 to 2002, is the most brutal war of the twentieth century, accounting for several thousand deaths and millions of displacements. The war and its trauma have led to several psychological and physiological challenges among civilians, resulting in post-traumatic disorders. Toward the end of the war, Aminatta Forna published her first memoir, titled The Devil That Danced on the Water (2002), in which she investigates her father's execution and the narration traverses her life between war-struck Sierra Leone and Europe. Through the next decade, her later novels, The Memory of Love (2010) and Happiness (2018), project the violence, trauma, and the aftermath of war in Sierra Leone. In these narratives, Forna explicitly expresses her concern about human rights violations during and after the war. Forna narrates experiences about displacement, trauma, associated memories, and how individuals and communities cope with their traumatic experiences through her characters and her own experiences. This essay examines the intertextuality in her three narratives by centralizing trauma, its aftermath, and recovery, amalgamating the personal, social, cultural, historical, and political instances contributing to the traumatic environment with pertinent theoretical insights.

The correspondence between Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman covers a period of 40 years, from 1947-1986, and encompasses the professional and personal developments, accomplishments, disappointments, and satisfactions of that period.

Marian Engel was a writer's writer - an iconoclast, deeply admired and loved by a generation of Canadian authors and critics. Informal gatherings were often held at Engel's Toronto house, and it was there that Engel's many literary friendships were first nurtured, later to blossom through the exchange of numerous and extraordinary letters, which are variously funny, insightful, irreverent, and moving. Engel's lively epistolary practice offers a view of the literary landscape in Canada from 1965 to 1985 as seen through her correspondence with mentor Hugh MacLennan, and friends and colleagues Robertson Davies, Dennis Lee, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Matt Cohen, Robert Weaver, and Graeme Gibson, to name but a few. In the spring of 2001, the Marian Engel Archive in Hamilton, Ontario received an exciting and unexpected new installment of Engel correspondence.Marian Engel: Life in Lettersis born of that gift. In making their selection, Christl Verduyn and Kathleen Garay have chosen correspondence that specifically captures Engel's life as a writer, a narrative that spans her early youthful travels in Europe to her early death in 1985. In addition to the letters sent to her friends, this startling and important collection includes letters by Engel to critics, to editors, to granting officers, to publishers, and a brilliant letter to a chief librarian lambasting him for, among other pungent criticisms, the library's prejudice against 'Domesticity' amongst other categories. Thoughtfully presented and accompanied by insightful commentary, these letters are rich in their detail, filling in the fine points in the life of not only one Canadian writer, but of a nation of writers.

Gabrielle Roy was one of the most prominent Canadian authors of the twentieth century. Joyce Marshall, an excellent writer herself, was one of Roy's English translators. The two shared a deep and long-lasting friendship based on a shared interest in language and writing. In Translation offers a critical examination of the more than two hundred letters exchanged by Roy and Marshall between 1959 and 1980. In their letters, Roy and Marshall exchange news about their general health and well-being, their friends and family, their surroundings, their travels, and other writers, as well as their dealings with critics, editors, and publishers. They recount comical incidents and strange encounters in their lives, and reflect on human nature, current events, and, from time to time, their writing. Of particular interest to the two women were the problems they encountered during the translation process. Many passages in the letters concern the ways in which the nuances of language can be shaped through translation. Editor Jane Everett has arranged the letters here in chronological order and has added critical notes to fill in the historical and literary gaps, as well as to identify various editorial problems. Shedding light on the process of writing and translating, In Translation is an invaluable addition to the study of Canadian writing and to the literature on these two important figures.

The sheer volume of Stora's encyclopedic annotated bibliography, which includes historical texts, sociological studies, memoirs, and literary works, reveals the impact that French colonization and the war of independence have had on writers and intellectuals in both France and Algeria in the twentieth century.1 More relevant still to a study of Mimouni's generation of writers are the figures provided in Jean Déjeux's 1989 thematic study of postindependence francophone Algerian novelists: thirty-three percent of works by the one hundred twenty-three novelists and short story writers publishing between 1963 andl987 are wholly or in part dedicated to the theme of war. [...] Mimouni's caustic critique rarely misses its mark, revealing how political and cultural processes have contributed to Algeria's failure to create a democratic nation from the rubble of the struggle for liberation.\\n In the second instance, Tombéza also attributes an enabling if sinister power to a particular category of written texts: compendiums of regulations and procedural manuals, the exclusive purview of Amili, the hospital personnel officer and eminence grise.