Marian and the Major: Marian Engel’s ‘Elizabeth and the Golden City’ (review)

Christl Verduyn has devoted her career to the work of Marian Engel. According to Verduyn, ‘Engel wrote especially for the women of her generation . . . Split in their aspirations for artistic expression and representation, separated (out) as mothers and daughters, women in Marian Engel’s world of fiction struggle to fuse, refuse, and defuse the oppositional forces that shape female experience’ (Lifelines: Marian Engel’s Writings).

Marian and the Major may be said to fuse life and art: it is a reconstruction of Engel’s final work-in-progress, with biographical/historical contexts provided by Verduyn. Her extensive archival research and her in-depth knowledge of her author make this an intimate reading experience as well as a solid scholarly accomplishment.

The book is in two parts: ‘the chicken’ (‘an unpublished [and unfinished] novel’) and ‘the egg’ (‘the background to, and origins of, this novel’). Part I introduces us to a fascinating episode in colonial Canadian history: the emigration to Ontario from Wales of Major William Kingdom Rains, accompanied by two sisters, Elizabeth and Frances Doubleday, who begin as wards and end as wives. Verduyn’s narrative provides the ‘sheer reading pleasure’ of making Canadian history personal, as Engel wished. Verduyn documents the circumstances that brought Rains, a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, to Lake Simcoe, then St. Joseph Island, where he literally founded a polygamous dynasty. A photo spread gives us visual confirmation of people and places.

Rains, an energetic imperialist, attracted Engel’s antagonism and curiosity – he provides a model for Colonel Cary in Bear (1976) – yet the dichotomized sisters especially inspired Engel’s creative reflection: she herself was separated from her twin sister by adoption. However, Engel did not reconstruct the late Victorian history of this unconventional family in Upper Canada. In Part II, ‘Elizabeth and the Golden City,’ Engel projects this odd triangle into the twentieth century, superimposing it onto some aspects of her own personal journey from small-town Ontario girlhood, to student life at McGill in the 1950s, then her Toronto writing life in the 1960s and 1970s. It is Elizabeth, the intellectual sister, who becomes the vehicle for Engel’s witty and wry observations on her life and times, rather than stay-at-home Frances. And it is in the elastic use of Elizabeth’s first-person voice that Engel’s social satire is sharpest. This voice comes to life, paradoxically, with the death of the mother, as ‘Elizabeth and the Golden City’ begins with Elizabeth, now a single mother reflecting on herself as a bookish daughter:

When my mother died, I was reading Jane Eyre.

That would be a good line for the beginning of a novel . . . Unfortunately, it is not fiction: it is the first line of my adult life, the end, as they say, of the beginning, and the beginning of the end; at once a commencement and an obstacle, a rock I cannot climb, a stream too wide for me to ford.

This passage characterizes Elizabeth as both self-consciously literary and emotionally orphaned. When Elizabeth and Frances’s irresponsible father abandons his teenage daughters, it is not surprising that both find in the charismatic Major Arthur Silliker a father figure as well as husband. Yet the more independent-minded Elizabeth ultimately rejects that father-husband, as she will her own (younger) second husband, writer Joe deLesseps. Engel’s manuscript offers a variety of pungent glimpses of Canadian culture in the making, including the rise of home-grown publishing houses, but the greatest strength of Engel’s writing is Elizabeth’s voice, especially as she matures and becomes more opinionated, angry, individualistic.

The manuscript ends with another fusion of life and art: Elizabeth’s final interior monologue while facing death. In it, syntactical breakdown reflects both author’s and character’s fading powers while engaging the reader’s sympathy: ‘[I] was wracked I had been racked on the racks, they had cracked me open like a...