When my mother died, I was readingJane Eyre.

That would be a good line for the beginning of a novel. It’s not only a good line, it’s a great one, as flexible and funny as, “‘Hell,’ said the Duchess as she slid down the banister,” as potentially pathetic as “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.” It could begin a romantic novel, a serious literary novel, a Gothic detective novel, or indeed a parody. Any of the genres would adopt it with reverence, for it is the opening line of a darned good read. I’d love it if it...

I drove through the beautiful August weather, the hot south-west wind grilling the corn golden as it swept through the fields around me, in a state of elation. I felt young. The good things of life were falling in my lap again. I was running, again, from Corinna to Duffy to Frank, and when it was over I had my two goddesses in Montreal to return to. Who were now safe in the keeping of the Wise Virgin, as we used to call her.

I had all day to get to Kingston, for Duffy was not to be free until...

The Major had a wonderful time at McGill, as he should have, for on an orthodox level, it was made for him, a minor member of the British establishment, the only Canadian university that Britain at that time chose to notice. As we walked through the curved stone gates to deal with the bursar and the registrar, he whistled and bustled and pointed out the beauties of the campus, stopped respectfully and pulled a forelock at the grave of James McGill under the gingko tree (we must read about him, Lizzie) and steered my trembling feet to the right offices....

Montreal, Sept. 6

Lodged with Corinna (girls in her guest room, I in dressing room) a fortnight after my return, while hunting accommodation. Frances a delight in her enthusiasm: a sponge for everything C. knows and can show her. They’ve hunted down all the second-hand and nearly-new shops run by private schools, Junior League, etc. where it apparently is possible to find excellent clothing for a song and F. is now a fashion plate: twice the young woman who left Scanlon’s. She has given up her mad early resolve to work as a waitress and now concedes that young wives...

In my day – and it strikes me as strange that I am old enough to use that phrase,dans mon jour, in the olden days – there was little to interest us in the way of politics, Europe was still cleaning up from the war and unvisitable except by the rich and the brave, and there was a long, dull war in Korea that did not bear discussion. Television had just been invented and seemed beneath notice, it was so oafish, and the art form that everyone was preoccupied with was the musical comedy.

Hundreds of Martins were at work in...

The process of education has always involved the process of the student’s leaving hearth and home to absorb and delineate the values of his own generation in opposition and apposition to those of his professors.

This was harder for me to do, perhaps, than for Student A, who lived at the university, while I was living with Frances and the Major; but it could not be said that I had failed to wipe the dust of Scanlon’s off my feet; the renegade position was easy to achieve.

The ideas of my generation were hard to define, however, though in retrospect...

The Major groaned about expenses. The shipping agency was not doing well. Overloaded with five courses and a baby, I cared little, ate little, tended my child, helped Frances where I could. The Major could be as unhappy as he wanted, I had my child. Chameau went on sabbatical to Paris, my little group of poets found me too domestic, I did my work, paid no one any mind. When the Dean remarked that I had thrown away a graduate fellowship, I said I was sorry, my husband was coming home and we were moving …

To Toronto, the Major...

I arrived in Toronto at 11:15 at night on May 19th, 1956, the year I graduated from McGill, the day, indeed, with two young men who had similarly been knighted, in a Baby Austin. At a service station on the Kingston Road they transferred my luggage from their trunk to that of the Major’s bomber and took off. My bus fare had paid for their gas. I felt grown up, firm, and rather strange. I had been living alone and childless in the box room of Corinna’s apartment building since our lease had expired on the 30th of April. I...

Suddenly, it was over for me, and like all the fundamental changes I have made in my life, the change was made internally, and over a period of time rather than by conscious decision; so that I began first to take less joy in their company, then to resent the programmatic schedule the Major insisted on maintaining, then, finally, to refuse what I had previously assented to. I went out when they expected me to babysit, I brought, shockingly, a man home after a party (I was shocked myself and disapproved of myself but I must also have enjoyed it...

I have lived now for fifty years, and at last understand old women who wear young women’s clothes: inside their bags of skin they are the same people they were at two, at seven, at twenty-nine: time passes them like a toboggan and they forget that they have aged. I have seen some of the Depression, more of the Koreas and Vietnam imbroglios. I have lived through the Beatniks, the Hippies, the Yippies, the ages of William Lyon MacKenzie King, St Laurent, Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson, that which will be called the golden or asinine age of Trudeau. I have lived...

If I have had any usefulness as a publisher it is not because I was a clever girl. Anyone whose favourite authors are Virginia Woolf and Henry Green should not be allowed near a selection of manuscripts in a publishing house that hopes to survive financially in modern Canada. In non-fiction, however, the mediocrity of my taste and scientific education led me up useful corridors: I seemed always to know just what the average book-buyer would want to know about a year ahead of time, a useful time lag in terms of selection. I would wander the stores shopping and...

When my mother died, I was readingJane Eyre. When the Major died, I was either reading the proofs of, or arguing with Ron Catherwood on the telephone about the title of, an excellent manual in our new Medical series, entitled CHEMOTHERAPY AND YOU, a subject in which the Major’s terminal illness had made me become interested. In fact, it launched the whole medical series, which is now an expensive embroilment, but which will, I’m convinced, eventually become profitable, particularly if the Americans pick it up. But Catherwood’s suggestion that the titles are all wrong is probably correct; the buyer...

Things continued normally for a number of months, though I knew I still had not buried the Major in my mind until funeral music started to play during the empty spaces of my repose and small fits of weeping interrupted television programmes or evenings reading manuscripts. A sad parade of small incidents, a number of flashes that were as clear as photographs, preoccupied me for weeks on end: I had to do my mourning. I was alone that winter, and I could afford to wander wrapped in sadness.

The next stage was less pleasant; though I had stopped drinking with...

At first I came to in the recovery room or was it limbo where the bright ceiling lights shone through crossed sets of chromium refrigerator racks and there were racks of bodies and I was wracked I had been racked on the racks, they had cracked me open like a crab to get the crab in my bones, and the floor of the operating room had been white tile so they could hose down my blood and my excrement and there were counters over which hung mallets and bone saws as if it were a butcher shop. I was broken....