The Bear Tamer Reconsidered

The headline on Marian Engel’s obituary in The Globe and Mail in February 1985 misspelled both her first and last names. “Author wrote best seller, won award,” it declared. She was so much more than that skimpy accolade attests. Engel was both a citizen and a writer, as committed to cultural nationalism and improving the lot of her fellow scribes as she was dedicated to writing her own fiction. The author of seven novels, two collections of short stories, two children’s books and an essay on islands, Engel was also a working journalist, the founding president of the Writers’ Union of Canada, a prime agitator for public lending right (paying royalties to authors for the use of their books in libraries) and the chair of the board of the Toronto Public Library. She died of cancer at the age of 51.

Her best known novel is Bear. I sought it out after reading Christl Verduyn and Kathleen Garay’s Marian Engel: Life in Letters. The story of a love...