Marian Engel - Literary Life

Literary Life

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

She wrote two children's books; Adventures of Moon Bay Towers (1974) and My name is not Odessa Yarker (1977).

Engel's most famous and controversial novel was Bear (1976), a tale of erotic love between a librarian and a bear. She won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction in 1976 for Bear.

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.

In 1981 she wrote the text for a coffee-table style travel book Islands of Canada with photographs by J. A. Kraulis.

Engel was an avid journal keeper. Her journals were primarily a repository for memories and details 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 1965-1985 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)

The novel on which she was working at the time of her death, Elizabeth and the Golden City was never completed until Christyl Verduyn incorporated it into Marion and the Major: Engel’s Elizabeth and the Golden City which was published in 2010.