Marian Engel

A lonely woman journeys toward inner freedom and strengths and a sense of communion with all living creatures

Bear

La joven e introvertida Lou abandona su trabajo como bibliotecaria cuando se le encarga hacer inventario de los libros de una mansión victoriana situada en una remota isla canadiense, propiedad de un enigmático coronel, ya fallecido. Ansiosa por reconstruir la curiosa historia de la casa, pronto descubre que la isla tiene otro habitante: un oso. Cuando se da cuenta de que este es el único que puede proporcionarle algo de compañía, surgirá entre ellos una extraña relación. Una relación íntima, inquietante y nada ambigua. Gradualmente, Lou se va convenciendo de que el oso es el compañero perfecto, que colma todas sus expectativas. En todos los sentidos. Será entonces cuando emprenda un camino de autodescubrimiento. A pesar del impacto que causó su publicación, Oso se alzó con el Governor General's Literary Award en 1976 y está considerada una de las mejores (y más controvertidas) novelas de la literatura canadiense.

The winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Marian Engel’s most famous – and most controversial – novel tells the unforgettable story of a woman transformed by a primal, erotic relationship. Lou is a lonely librarian who spends her days in the dusty archives of the Historical Institute. When an unusual field assignment comes her way, she jumps at the chance to travel to a remote island in northern Ontario, where she will spend the summer cataloguing a library that belonged to an eccentric nineteenth-century colonel. Eager to investigate the estate’s curious history, she is shocked to discover that the island has one other inhabitant: a bear. Lou’s imagination is soon overtaken by the island’s past occupants, whose deep fascination with bears gradually becomes her own. Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-awakening, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature. What she discovers will change her life forever. As provocative and powerful now as when it was first published. Includes a reading group guide.

Ayı

A Novel

The Honeyman Festival

MARGUERITE HEBER, AN ANGLICAN NUN, RELATES HER LIFE IN THE FORM OF A LETTER TO A FRIEND. WRITTEN WITH WIT AND COMPASSION, SHE TELLS OF HER CHILDHOOD, HER LIFE IN THE CONVENT, HER DEPARTURE FOR THE ORDER TO MARRY, AND THE BREAK-UP OF THE MARRIAGE.

The Glassy Sea

roman

Beer

Monodromos

Christl Verduyn

Rains, a former soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, immigrated to Canada at the same period as Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. He brought with him his wards, sisters Frances and Elizabeth. The three settled on St Joseph Island in northern Ontario, where their unusual domestic arrangement caught the attention and imagination of, among others, the nineteenth-century British travel-writer Anna Jameson, the Swiss born naturalist and explorer Louis Agassiz, the American poet William Cullen Bryant, and the Canadian novelist Marian Engel.

Engel's "Elizabeth and the Golden City"

Marian and the Major

First published in 1970, The Honeyman Festival chronicles one night in the life of Minn Burge, a woman in her mid-thirties who is torn between affection for her family and the need for a life in which impulse and intelligence can once again find play. Pregnant with her fourth child, and unable to take refuge in facile resolutions, Minn interrogates her life with a razor-edge passion in which many readers will find they too are involved. This groundbreaking novel by one of Canada’s most beloved novelists is now available in a beautifully packaged A List edition, featuring an introduction by novelist and short story writer Caroline Adderson.

After five years buried like a mole amid the decaying maps and manuscripts of an historical institute, Lou is given a welcome field assignment: to catalogue a nineteenth-century library, improbably located in an octagonal house on a remote island in northern Ontario. Eager to reconstruct the estate's curious history, she is unprepared for her discovery that the island has one other inhabitant: a bear. Lou's imagination is soon overtaken by the estate's historical occupants, whose fascination with bear lore becomes her own. Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-discovery, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature through her bizarre and healing relationship with the bear. A daring and compelling novel, Marian Engel's "Bear" won the Governor General's Award for 1976. "From the Hardcover edition."

No Clouds of Glory

Afra Kavanagh

Tammy MacNeil

Early Poems and Stories

Sunbeams from a Golden Machine

László Gál

When Geraldine's brother announces that his sister has changed her name to Odessa Yarker, Geraldine has a difficult time convincing people to use her real name.

My Name is Not Odessa Yarker

The Tattooed Woman

Lunatic Villas

First published in 1968 by Longman Canada, the novel tells the hilarious and frustrating story of 30-year-old academic Sarah Porlock as she makes her way through the minefields of career and love in late-1960s Toronto. Long recognised for her groundbreaking novel Bear (1976), Engel's first novel can now rightly be seen to inaugurate and participate in a number of important literary traditions. Like Scott Symons' controversial 1967 book, Place d'Armes (also published by the Insomniac Library), it is a species of notebook or journal, which, as critic Elspeth Cameron has argued, reminds us (as has so much recent Canadian literature) that evolution is preferred to revolution, that what is great in the past can be adapted to give strength to the present. This is also one of the first of the truly great feminist novels written in English, inaugurating a tradition that would continue with the work of Margaret Drabble and Margaret Atwood.

Sarah Bastard's Notebook

One Way Street

Harriet Ross, a strong and vital woman who lives on a small Toronto street with her children, spends her time dealing with friends, neighbors, lovers, and children

Marian Engel

Books

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