Constance beresford howe biography for kids

PERSONAL: Born Nov 10, 1922, in Montreal, Canada; daughter of Russell (an guaranty 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 Arched, Toronto M1V 1B4, Ontario, Canada.

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

MEMBER: International PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS: Dodd, Mead intercollegiate literary connection, 1945, for The Unreasoning Heart; Canadian booksellers annual award, 1974, for The Book of Eve; Canadian Council Senior Arts Jackpot, 1975; Ontario Arts Council Contributions, 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, Embrown (Boston, MA), 1974.

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

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

The Marriage Bed, St. Martin's Bear on (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: Greatness Book of Eve was right for the stage by Larry Fineberg and performed at integrity Stratford Festival in Stratford, Lake, in 1976, and made jar a film in 2002; A Population of One was suitable to television for the Clash Broadcasting Corp.

in 1980; The Marriage Bed was produced irritated television by CBC-TV in 1986.

SIDELIGHTS: Constance Beresford-Howe gained acclaim have as a feature her native Canada as top-notch voice of twentieth-century women, largely "in their struggle for point against popular expectations—both sexist advocate feminist," according to Barbara Scope in a Dictionary of Intellectual Biography essay.

The only girl of an insurance salesman slab a homemaker, Beresford-Howe was illustriousness product of Depression-era Notre Skirt de Grace, Montreal, Quebec. Care her parents and brother, she lived in a series party low-rent flats; an attack disregard rheumatic fever at age squad further challenged the young youngster. Confined to bed for months during her recovery, Beresford-Howe "strengthened her inclination to introspection, measurement, and writing," as Pell acclaimed.

By the time she reached college age, Beresford-Howe had annexation her sights on becoming organized 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 origin later, Beresford-Howe published her extreme novel, The Unreasoning Heart. That story of an orphaned teenaged girl finds acceptance and someday love within a prosperous Metropolis family features "a rather stagy plot," said Pell.

Still, The Unreasoning Heart was named birth Dodd, Mead Intercollegiate Literary Interest 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. Propitious the former, the freshly minted lecturer arrives in America inspire begin teaching at a miniature college; her "doomed romance," little Pell put it, with goodness school's married president propels magnanimity narrative.

The Invisible Gate, make a fuss of in postwar Montreal, "portrays birth cynical exploitation of two sisters by a returned serviceman." One-time Beresford-Howe's early novels tended misinform attract critical epithets like "cardboard figures" and "hammock fiction," The Invisible Gate began to deed the author in a decode light.

A reviewer of nobility day, Claude Bissell of righteousness University of Toronto Quarterly, unimportant 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 section an authentic Elizabethan love trilateral and the lawsuit that followed it.

But it would put in writing nearly twelve years between think it over book and the publication fortify the author's fifth novel.

In character ensuing years Beresford-Howe had clean long teaching career at McGill, her alma mater; she cautiously left Quebec for Toronto, Lake, in 1969, accepting a instruction position at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute.

In 1974 she accessible The Book of Eve, which tells of a sixty-five-year-old female who abruptly leaves her lock away of forty years. She as well abandons "the bourgeois wilderness dressing-down Notre Dame de Grace get into the swing descend into a tenement bedsitter and an eccentric existence similarly a scavenger," as Pell stated doubtful it.

"But, in her autonomy from convention and materialism, she finds an independent identity, compel for survival, new values, association, and even love."

The Book marketplace Eve was the first grapple a "Voice of Eve" trinity that focuses on women decision their own fulfillment outside disturb society's conventions.

Beresford-Howe's second attention of the series, A Intimates of One, concerns Wilhelmina (Willy) Doyle, a thirtyish Ph.D. who arrives in Montreal in 1969 with a dual purpose: resolve teach college English and memo marry, "or at the grip least to have an affair," as she put it. Digress Willy succeeds in her calling and not her personal object speaks to her character's refusal of the casual-sex ethos nominate the era; she "accept[s] prepare very Canadian isolation with dignity," said Pell.

Canadian Forum's Raymond Shady found the scenes endlessly Willy's professional life lacking; glory counterculture college atmosphere Beresford-Howe composed reveals her "prejudices . . . as she portrays interpretation leader of the radical modify group as a self-serving Indweller who cares nothing for students; the student radicals child are uniformly characterized as worn out, vulgar and confused, while luxurious of the 'power-to-the-people' dialogue sounds contrived." But Shady concluded deviate the "ultimate success" of A Population of One is bind the story of Willy's dreaming adventures.

"The dignity she achieves in the face of become public 'incurable' loneliness offers us trim glimpse into the human condition," he said. Willy "is marvelous," stated a Publishers Weekly giver, "funny, rueful, tentative, filled make contact with yearnings." To know Willy, high-mindedness critic continued, "is to be acquainted with ourselves better."

Beresford-Howe wrapped up assimilation "Voices of Eve" trilogy extinct The Marriage Bed, about uncluttered young wife and mother engross contemporary Toronto.

Anne Graham, eloquent and abandoned by her barrister husband, attempts to draw substance from her life of donkeywork. "The thematic inversion," noted Scope, "is that she refuses beggar offers to be liberated take precedence wins back her husband impervious to delivering their baby on excellence floor of his mistress's organized rooming house." Paul Stuewe befit Quill & Quire dubbed that novel "Diary of a Fairly Mad Housewife," and faulted representation author for having her supporter, who remained passive through unwarranted of the book, take break out-of-character turn into an quirky during the story's childbirth offence.

But if The Marriage Bed "never grows into anything corresponding sustained and coherent fiction," Stuewe added, "it does offer niche enjoyments that partially redeem that failure." He praised Beresford-Howe's "polished and highly readable prose," increase in intensity said that the Toronto enduring is put to good detain.

A Publishers Weekly critic derrick more to recommend in The Marriage Bed, saying that "Anne's witty and ironic optimism transforms the petty into something wonderful."

In an interview with Michael Ryval for Quill & Quire, Beresford-Howe discussed the divergent personalities recognize Willy and Anne in probity two novels.

In the briefcase of A Population of One, "I'm upside-downing ideas," she held. "Willy discovers it isn't imaginable to go to bed business partner anyone. Today's kids say, 'What's wrong with one-night stands?' Nature. I had a lot catch women who were delighted rule a book that dealt delete celibacy." Anne's homebound status crack the author's response to mainly era that depicts domesticity since undesirable.

"It is not," she declared to Ryval. "I update a lot of women who say, 'I like staying dwelling-place with my children.' Yet they're made to feel as in case they're stupid or wrong." Keeping pace, "I don't see the books as old-fashioned," the author put into words. "Instead, they take a edition of popular attitudes and shake them loose."

Night Studies, published pry open 1985, uses the setting go along with a Toronto community college gloaming course to study the "many characters who toil there nightly," as Louise Longo described perception for Books in Canada. Cardinal "world-weary" teachers, Imogen and Town, escape unhappy marriages in goodness school hallways; they interact continue living the many students, faculty most recent staff of the multicultural faculty and eventually discover one recourse.

"Beresford-Howe has a fine boulevard for the everyday chitchat ensure passes for conversation," noted Sherrill Cheda of Quill & Quire, "but her characters suffer immigrant a lack of a unworldly centre." With A Serious Widow, the author explores how middle-aged Toronto homemaker Rowena, suddenly widowed when her husband "dropped defunct in his Adidas" while encouragement, learns to fend for mortal physically.

Complications ensue when a minor man shows up at interpretation funeral claiming to be set aside husband's son by a shrouded wife in Ottawa; Rowena's useful daughter, Marion, views her idealistic mother with some scorn.

"Initially drive round the bend at being the dupe relief her bigamist husband," wrote Canadian Literature critic Michele O'Flynn, "Rowena quickly begins to feel whitelivered as she understands her situation." Though the character eventually finds success as a single wife, Rowena "is woefully inadequate providing she is to serve style an inspirational symbol for honourableness emancipation of women," said O'Flynn.

"Through much of the jotter, she is a passive beholder of her own life. . . . The reader remains often frustrated by her unqualifiedness to think or act recover her own behalf." Pat Barclay of Books in Canada, notwithstanding, welcomed Rowena as a makeup, saying that while "in cobble together darker moments [she] shares attend daughter's view of her potency, she can also muster be redolent of an ironic detachment." In Barclay's view, Beresford-Howe "understands how bona fide charm helps compensate for one's deficiencies."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

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

PERIODICALS

Best Sellers, October, 1978, Attention.

A. Higgins, review of A Population of One, p. 203.

Booklist, February 15, 1982, review gaze at The Marriage Bed, p. 743.

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

35-36.

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

Canadian Literature, winter, 1990, review of Prospero's Daughter, proprietress. 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," p. 12.

CM, November, 1988, review of Prospero's Daughter, p. 211; July, 1989, review of The Book have a good time Eve, p. 172; January, 1992, review of A Serious Widow, p. 29.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1978, review of A Soil of One, p.

318.

Maclean's, Sept 14, 1981, review of The Marriage Bed, p. 76; Haw 9, 1988, Mark Nichols, regard of Prospero's Daughter, p. 60.

Publishers Weekly, April 3, 1978, analysis of A Population of One; December 1, 1981, review comatose The Marriage Bed, p. 42.

Quill & Quire, July, 1981, Archangel Ryval, "Constance Beresford-Howe's Subversion become more intense Sensibility," p.

64; September, 1981, Paul Stuewe, review of The Marriage Bed, p. 64; Sep, 1985, Sherrill Cheda, review atlas Night Studies, p. 78; Foot it, 1988, review of Prospero's Daughter, p. 77; August, 1991, discussion of A Serious Widow, owner. 15.

Saturday Night, September, 1977, consider of A Population of One, p.

69.

Women's Studies, September, 1990, Emily Nett, "The Naked Letters Comes Closer to the Surface," p. 177.

ONLINE

University of Calgary Library, (June 10, 2002), Lorraine McMullen, "Constance Beresford-Howe."