Constance beresford howe biography of albert

PERSONAL: Born Nov 10, 1922, in Montreal, Canada; daughter of Russell (an precaution salesman) and Marjory (a homemaker; maiden name, Moore) Beresford-Howe; ringed Christopher W. Pressnell (a teacher), December 31, 1960; children: Jeremy. Education:McGill University, B.A., 1945, M.A., 1946; Brown University, Ph.D., 1950.

ADDRESSES: Home—c/o Taylor, 55 Argowan Meniscus, Toronto M1V 1B4, Ontario, Canada.

CAREER:McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, lecturer, 1948-49, assistant professor, 1949-61, associate lecturer of English, 1961-69; Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Toronto, Ontario, professor range English, 1970-88.

MEMBER: International PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS: Dodd, Mead intercollegiate literary companionship, 1945, for The Unreasoning Heart; Canadian booksellers annual award, 1974, for The Book of Eve; Canadian Council Senior Arts Confer, 1975; Ontario Arts Council Aid, 1976, 1983, 1985.

WRITINGS:

The Unreasoning Heart, Dodd, Mead (New York, NY), 1946.

Of This Day's Journey, Dodd, Mead (New York, NY), 1948.

The Invisible Gate, Dodd, Mead (New York, NY), 1949.

My Lady Greensleeves, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1955.

The Book of Eve, Little, Dark-brown (Boston, MA), 1974.

A Population human One, Macmillan of Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1977, St.

Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1978.

The Marriage Bed, St. Martin's Subject to (New York, NY), 1981.

Night Studies, Macmillan Canada (Toronto, Ontario Canada), 1985.

Prospero's Daughter, Macmillan Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1988.

A Serious Widow, Macmillan Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1991.

Author of television script The Cuckoo Bird, Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 1981.

Contributor to periodicals, with Maclean's, Writer, and Chatelaine.

ADAPTATIONS: Rank Book of Eve was suitable for the stage by Larry Fineberg and performed at integrity Stratford Festival in Stratford, Lake, in 1976, and made penetrate a film in 2002; A Population of One was tailor-made accoutred to television for the Scamper Broadcasting Corp.

in 1980; The Marriage Bed was produced take care of television by CBC-TV in 1986.

SIDELIGHTS: Constance Beresford-Howe gained acclaim bit her native Canada as trig voice of twentieth-century women, optional extra "in their struggle for liberation against popular expectations—both sexist point of view feminist," according to Barbara Run in a Dictionary of Intellectual Biography essay.

The only colleen of an insurance salesman favour a homemaker, Beresford-Howe was significance product of Depression-era Notre Lassie de Grace, Montreal, Quebec. Catch on her parents and brother, she lived in a series exert a pull on low-rent flats; an attack appreciated rheumatic fever at age team further challenged the young youngster.

Confined to bed for months during her recovery, Beresford-Howe "strengthened her inclination to introspection, relevance, and writing," as Pell wellknown. By the time she reached college age, Beresford-Howe had interruption her sights on becoming boss high-school teacher. But Beresford-Howe excelled at writing, winning McGill University's Shakespeare Gold Medal in 1945, as well as the Peterson Prize for creative writing.

A epoch later, Beresford-Howe published her supreme novel, The Unreasoning Heart. That story of an orphaned young person girl finds acceptance and at the end of the day love within a prosperous City family features "a rather theatrical plot," said Pell.

Still, The Unreasoning Heart was named greatness Dodd, Mead Intercollegiate Literary Comradeship winner. Other early Beresford-Howe novels include Of This Day's Journey and The Invisible Gate. Both books trace the love lives of young Canadian women. Compile the former, the freshly minted lecturer arrives in America conformity begin teaching at a at a low level college; her "doomed romance," type Pell put it, with illustriousness school's married president propels leadership narrative.

The Invisible Gate, congregation in postwar Montreal, "portrays nobleness cynical exploitation of two sisters by a returned serviceman." Interminably Beresford-Howe's early novels tended strengthen attract critical epithets like "cardboard figures" and "hammock fiction," The Invisible Gate began to puton the author in a higher quality light.

A reviewer of grandeur day, Claude Bissell of prestige University of Toronto Quarterly, empty this novel for the author's "lively talent" and her "easy fluency" of prose style, according to Pell's essay. In 1955 Beresford-Howe published My Lady Greensleeves, a historical novel based clash an authentic Elizabethan love trilateral and the lawsuit that followed it.

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But it would be nearly twelve years halfway that book and the publish of the author's fifth novel.

In the ensuing years Beresford-Howe difficult a long teaching career trouble McGill, her alma mater; she reluctantly left Quebec for Toronto, Ontario, in 1969, accepting capital teaching position at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. In 1974 she published The Book of Eve, which tells of a sixty-five-year-old woman who abruptly leaves drop husband of forty years.

She also abandons "the bourgeois backwoods of Notre Dame de Stomachchurning to descend into a lifeless flat and an eccentric fighting as a scavenger," as Run described it. "But, in respite freedom from convention and acquisitiveness, she finds an independent oneness, strength for survival, new restraint, fellowship, and even love."

The Tome of Eve was the important of a "Voice of Eve" trilogy that focuses on battalion finding their own fulfillment out of society's conventions.

Beresford-Howe's in the second place work of the series, A Population of One, concerns Wilhelmina (Willy) Doyle, a thirtyish Ph.D. who arrives in Montreal have as a feature 1969 with a dual purpose: to teach college English elitist to marry, "or at goodness very least to have implicate affair," as she put inflame. That Willy succeeds in show someone the door career and not her bodily goal speaks to her character's rejection of the casual-sex traditions of the era; she "accept[s] her very Canadian isolation fulfil dignity," said Pell.

Canadian Forum's Raymond Shady found the scenes of Willy's professional life lacking; the counterculture college atmosphere Beresford-Howe created reveals her "prejudices . . . as she portrays the leader of the elementary reform group as a comfy American who cares nothing bring about his students; the student radicals themselves are uniformly characterized gorilla shabby, vulgar and confused, to the fullest extent a finally much of the 'power-to-the-people' debate sounds contrived." But Shady complete that the "ultimate success" carefulness A Population of One attempt in the story of Willy's romantic adventures.

"The dignity she achieves in the face behove her 'incurable' loneliness offers lunatic a glimpse into the oneself condition," he said. Willy "is marvelous," stated a Publishers Weekly contributor, "funny, rueful, tentative, complete with yearnings." To know Willy, the critic continued, "is improve know ourselves better."

Beresford-Howe wrapped become her "Voices of Eve" trine with The Marriage Bed, jump a young wife and be quiet in contemporary Toronto.

Anne Dancer, pregnant and abandoned by multifarious lawyer husband, attempts to inveigle meaning from her life homework drudgery. "The thematic inversion," distinguished Pell, "is that she refuses all offers to be free and easy and wins back her bridegroom by delivering their baby power the floor of his mistress's communal rooming house." Paul Stuewe of Quill & Quire baptized this novel "Diary of first-class Moderately Mad Housewife," and complete the author for having scratch protagonist, who remained passive look sharp much of the book, gear an out-of-character turn into operate activist during the story's internment climax.

But if The Nuptials Bed "never grows into anything resembling sustained and coherent fiction," Stuewe added, "it does intimation other enjoyments that partially repossess this failure." He praised Beresford-Howe's "polished and highly readable prose," and said that the Toronto setting is put to decent use.

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A Publishers Weekly commentator found more to recommend stem The Marriage Bed, saying defer "Anne's witty and ironic hilarity transforms the petty into position wonderful."

In an interview with Archangel Ryval for Quill & Quire, Beresford-Howe discussed the divergent personalities of Willy and Anne resource the two novels.

In high-mindedness case of A Population goods One, "I'm upside-downing ideas," she said. "Willy discovers it isn't possible to go to silent with anyone. Today's kids claim, 'What's wrong with one-night stands?' Everything. I had a collection of women who were happy with a book that dealt with celibacy." Anne's homebound perception is the author's response consent to an era that depicts domesticity as undesirable.

"It is not," she declared to Ryval. "I know a lot of division who say, 'I like citizen home with my children.' Thus far they're made to feel though if they're stupid or wrong." Ultimately, "I don't see grandeur books as old-fashioned," the father said. "Instead, they take swell number of popular attitudes deliver rattle them loose."

Night Studies, obtainable in 1985, uses the rowdy of a Toronto community institute evening course to study rendering "many characters who toil in all directions nightly," as Louise Longo designated it for Books in Canada. Two "world-weary" teachers, Imogen queue Tyler, escape unhappy marriages deduct the school hallways; they lend a hand with the many students, capacity and staff of the multicultural college and eventually discover tune another.

"Beresford-Howe has a positive ear for the everyday causerie that passes for conversation," celebrated Sherrill Cheda of Quill & Quire, "but her characters swallow from a lack of well-organized spiritual centre." With A Terrible Widow, the author explores how in the world middle-aged Toronto homemaker Rowena, instantaneously widowed when her husband "dropped dead in his Adidas" exhaustively jogging, learns to fend expend herself.

Complications ensue when calligraphic young man shows up get rid of impurities the funeral claiming to embryonic her husband's son by top-hole secret wife in Ottawa; Rowena's successful daughter, Marion, views company unworldly mother with some scorn.

"Initially angry at being the sucker of her bigamist husband," wrote Canadian Literature critic Michele O'Flynn, "Rowena quickly begins to physical contact afraid as she understands turn a deaf ear to situation." Though the character finally finds success as a inimitable woman, Rowena "is woefully slight if she is to look after the needs of as an inspirational symbol get something done the emancipation of women," vocal O'Flynn.

"Through much of depiction book, she is a inert observer of her own man. . . . The exercise book is often frustrated by make more attractive inability to think or feign on her own behalf." Strike Barclay of Books in Canada, however, welcomed Rowena as orderly character, saying that while "in her darker moments [she] shares her daughter's view of any more competence, she can also assemble up an ironic detachment." Timely Barclay's view, Beresford-Howe "understands provide evidence genuine charm helps compensate matter one's deficiencies."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 88: Canadian Writers, 1920-1959, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

PERIODICALS

Best Sellers, October, 1978, R.

A. Higgins, review provision A Population of One, proprietress. 203.

Booklist, February 15, 1982, analysis of The Marriage Bed, owner. 743.

Books in Canada, October, 1985, Louise Longo, review of Night Studies, pp. 23-24; April, 1988, review of Prospero's Daughter, possessor. 25; October, 1991, Pat Barclay, "Making the Best of It," pp.

35-36.

Canadian Forum, February, 1978, Raymond Shady, "The Second Absolutely of Eve," pp. 38-39; Oct, 1985, Fergus Cronin, "Showing glory Hands: A Profile of Constance Beresford-Howe," p. 34.

Canadian Literature, coldness, 1990, review of Prospero's Daughter, p. 180; spring, 1993, Michele O'Flynn, "Serious Widows," pp.

155-156.

Cinema Canada, February, 1987, Edgar Matthews, "Yours, Mine and Ours: Anna Sandor and Constance Beresford-Howe," holder. 12.

CM, November, 1988, review medium Prospero's Daughter, p. 211; July, 1989, review of The Volume of Eve, p. 172; Jan, 1992, review of A Abysmal Widow, p.

29.

Kirkus Reviews, Hike 15, 1978, review of A Population of One, p. 318.

Maclean's, September 14, 1981, review break into The Marriage Bed, p. 76; May 9, 1988, Mark Nichols, review of Prospero's Daughter, proprietress. 60.

Publishers Weekly, April 3, 1978, review of A Population a few One; December 1, 1981, regard of The Marriage Bed, proprietress.

42.

Quill & Quire, July, 1981, Michael Ryval, "Constance Beresford-Howe's Disaffection and Sensibility," p. 64; Sept, 1981, Paul Stuewe, review well The Marriage Bed, p. 64; September, 1985, Sherrill Cheda, debate of Night Studies, p. 78; March, 1988, review of Prospero's Daughter, p.

77; August, 1991, review of A Serious Widow, p. 15.

Saturday Night, September, 1977, review of A Population go in for One, p. 69.

Women's Studies, Sept, 1990, Emily Nett, "The Exposed Soul Comes Closer to grandeur Surface," p. 177.

ONLINE

University of Metropolis Library,http://www.ucalgary.ca/ (June 10, 2002), Lothringen McMullen, "Constance Beresford-Howe."