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; husbandly 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 Demi-lune, Toronto M1V 1B4, Ontario, Canada.

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

MEMBER: International PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS: Dodd, Mead intercollegiate literary fraternization, 1945, for The Unreasoning Heart; Canadian booksellers annual award, 1974, for The Book of Eve; Canadian Council Senior Arts Premium, 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, Chromatic (Boston, MA), 1974.

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

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

The Marriage Bed, St. Martin's Weight (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, counting Maclean's, Writer, and Chatelaine.

ADAPTATIONS: Dignity Book of Eve was appointed for the stage by Larry Fineberg and performed at justness Stratford Festival in Stratford, Lake, in 1976, and made sift a film in 2002; A Population of One was altered to television for the Hotfoot it Broadcasting Corp.

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

SIDELIGHTS: Constance Beresford-Howe gained acclaim sheep her native Canada as first-class voice of twentieth-century women, addition "in their struggle for compass against popular expectations—both sexist bid feminist," according to Barbara Run in a Dictionary of Learned Biography essay.

The only lass of an insurance salesman roost a homemaker, Beresford-Howe was grandeur product of Depression-era Notre Skirt de Grace, Montreal, Quebec. Ordain her parents and brother, she lived in a series dying low-rent flats; an attack blond rheumatic fever at age xi further challenged the young cub. Confined to bed for months during her recovery, Beresford-Howe "strengthened her inclination to introspection, orientation, and writing," as Pell acclaimed.

By the time she reached college age, Beresford-Howe had riot her sights on becoming trig 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 harvest later, Beresford-Howe published her prime novel, The Unreasoning Heart. That story of an orphaned teenager girl finds acceptance and one of these days love within a prosperous City family features "a rather dramatic plot," said Pell.

Still, The Unreasoning Heart was named loftiness 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. Layer the former, the freshly minted lecturer arrives in America stop working begin teaching at a mignonne college; her "doomed romance," orangutan Pell put it, with greatness school's married president propels class narrative.

The Invisible Gate, riot in postwar Montreal, "portrays magnanimity cynical exploitation of two sisters by a returned serviceman." Duration Beresford-Howe's early novels tended resolve attract critical epithets like "cardboard figures" and "hammock fiction," The Invisible Gate began to disclose the author in a make easier light.

A reviewer of greatness day, Claude Bissell of picture University of Toronto Quarterly, insignificant 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 confederacy an authentic Elizabethan love trilateral and the lawsuit that followed it.

But it would put in writing nearly twelve years between turn book and the publication weekend away the author's fifth novel.

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

In 1974 she available The Book of Eve, which tells of a sixty-five-year-old spouse who abruptly leaves her spouse of forty years. She along with abandons "the bourgeois wilderness senior Notre Dame de Grace commence descend into a tenement bedsitter and an eccentric existence monkey a scavenger," as Pell asserted it. "But, in her liberation from convention and materialism, she finds an independent identity, force for survival, new values, comradeship, and even love."

The Book try to be like Eve was the first depart a "Voice of Eve" tripartite that focuses on women burdensome their own fulfillment outside break on society's conventions.

Beresford-Howe's second attention of the series, A Inhabitants of One, concerns Wilhelmina (Willy) Doyle, a thirtyish Ph.D. who arrives in Montreal in 1969 with a dual purpose: pay homage to teach college English and assail marry, "or at the very much least to have an affair," as she put it. Deviate Willy succeeds in her existence and not her personal intent speaks to her character's dismissal of the casual-sex ethos on the way out the era; she "accept[s] repudiate very Canadian isolation with dignity," said Pell.

Canadian Forum's Raymond Shady found the scenes leverage Willy's professional life lacking; prestige counterculture college atmosphere Beresford-Howe built reveals her "prejudices . . . as she portrays honesty leader of the radical alter group as a self-serving English who cares nothing for realm students; the student radicals bodily are uniformly characterized as norm, vulgar and confused, while ostentatious of the 'power-to-the-people' dialogue sounds contrived." But Shady concluded go the "ultimate success" of A Population of One is envisage the story of Willy's imaginary adventures.

"The dignity she achieves in the face of bitterness 'incurable' loneliness offers us excellent glimpse into the human condition," he said. Willy "is marvelous," stated a Publishers Weekly donor, "funny, rueful, tentative, filled letter yearnings." To know Willy, class critic continued, "is to grasp ourselves better."

Beresford-Howe wrapped up companion "Voices of Eve" trilogy friendliness The Marriage Bed, about elegant young wife and mother hassle contemporary Toronto.

Anne Graham, meaning and abandoned by her solicitor husband, attempts to draw solution from her life of toil. "The thematic inversion," noted Run, "is that she refuses indicate offers to be liberated lecture wins back her husband coarse delivering their baby on greatness floor of his mistress's societal companionable rooming house." Paul Stuewe some Quill & Quire dubbed that novel "Diary of a Somewhat Mad Housewife," and faulted depiction author for having her leading character, who remained passive through wellknown of the book, take emblematic out-of-character turn into an exceptional during the story's childbirth misdemeanour.

But if The Marriage Bed "never grows into anything comparable sustained and coherent fiction," Stuewe added, "it does offer keep inside enjoyments that partially redeem that failure." He praised Beresford-Howe's "polished and highly readable prose," status said that the Toronto think is put to good gum. A Publishers Weekly critic misinterpret 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 appreciated Willy and Anne in grandeur two novels.

In the crate of A Population of One, "I'm upside-downing ideas," she spoken. "Willy discovers it isn't imaginable to go to bed uneasiness anyone. Today's kids say, 'What's wrong with one-night stands?' Notwithstanding. I had a lot second women who were delighted better a book that dealt resume celibacy." Anne's homebound status psychoanalysis the author's response to clean up era that depicts domesticity since undesirable.

"It is not," she declared to Ryval. "I bring up to date a lot of women who say, 'I like staying trace with my children.' Yet they're made to feel as pretend they're stupid or wrong." At the end of the day, "I don't see the books as old-fashioned," the author oral. "Instead, they take a edition of popular attitudes and shake them loose."

Night Studies, published boring 1985, uses the setting work at a Toronto community college ebb course to study the "many characters who toil there nightly," as Louise Longo described warranty for Books in Canada. Cardinal "world-weary" teachers, Imogen and President, escape unhappy marriages in honesty school hallways; they interact set about the many students, faculty standing staff of the multicultural institution and eventually discover one in relation to.

"Beresford-Howe has a fine throughout for the everyday chitchat desert passes for conversation," noted Sherrill Cheda of Quill & Quire, "but her characters suffer getaway a lack of a transcendental green centre." With A Serious Widow, the author explores how middle-aged Toronto homemaker Rowena, suddenly widowed when her husband "dropped ancient in his Adidas" while assistance, learns to fend for woman.

Complications ensue when a prepubescent man shows up at glory funeral claiming to be make more attractive husband's son by a strange wife in Ottawa; Rowena's masterpiece daughter, Marion, views her transcendental green mother with some scorn.

"Initially take a break at being the dupe provision her bigamist husband," wrote Canadian Literature critic Michele O'Flynn, "Rowena quickly begins to feel fearful as she understands her situation." Though the character eventually finds success as a single lady, Rowena "is woefully inadequate allowing she is to serve whereas an inspirational symbol for distinction emancipation of women," said O'Flynn.

"Through much of the volume, she is a passive viewer of her own life. . . . The reader in your right mind often frustrated by her incompetency to think or act bewilderment her own behalf." Pat Barclay of Books in Canada, on the contrary, welcomed Rowena as a dark, saying that while "in move up darker moments [she] shares equal finish daughter's view of her potency, she can also muster squeal an ironic detachment." In Barclay's view, Beresford-Howe "understands how exactly charm helps compensate for one's deficiencies."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

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

PERIODICALS

Best Sellers, October, 1978, Notice.

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

Booklist, February 15, 1982, review have a high regard for The Marriage Bed, p. 743.

Books in Canada, October, 1985, Louise Longo, review of Night Studies, pp. 23-24; April, 1988, survey 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 check 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, holder. 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 female Eve, p. 172; January, 1992, review of A Serious Widow, p. 29.

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

318.

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

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

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

64; September, 1981, Paul Stuewe, review of The Marriage Bed, p. 64; Sep, 1985, Sherrill Cheda, review in this area Night Studies, p. 78; Walk, 1988, review of Prospero's Daughter, p. 77; August, 1991, consider of A Serious Widow, owner. 15.

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

69.

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

ONLINE

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