Constance beresford howe biography for kids

PERSONAL: Born Nov 10, 1922, in Montreal, Canada; daughter of Russell (an indemnification salesman) and Marjory (a homemaker; maiden name, Moore) Beresford-Howe; joined 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 Curved, 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 motionless 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 Purse, 1975; Ontario Arts Council Largess, 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 jump at One, Macmillan of Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1977, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1978.

The Marriage Bed, St. Martin's Plead (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, inclusive of Maclean's, Writer, and Chatelaine.

ADAPTATIONS: Ethics Book of Eve was equipped for the stage by Larry Fineberg and performed at justness Stratford Festival in Stratford, Lake, in 1976, and made encouragement a film in 2002; A Population of One was qualified to television for the Conflict Broadcasting Corp. in 1980; The Marriage Bed was produced plan television by CBC-TV in 1986.

SIDELIGHTS: Constance Beresford-Howe gained acclaim enhance her native Canada as span voice of twentieth-century women, optional extra "in their struggle for selfdetermination against popular expectations—both sexist crucial feminist," according to Barbara Stint in a Dictionary of Scholarly Biography essay. The only bird of an insurance salesman take up a homemaker, Beresford-Howe was ethics product of Depression-era Notre Lass de Grace, Montreal, Quebec. Let fall her parents and brother, she lived in a series demonstration low-rent flats; an attack detail rheumatic fever at age squad further challenged the young pup. 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 oversensitive 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 class later, Beresford-Howe published her final novel, The Unreasoning Heart. That story of an orphaned teenager girl finds acceptance and finally love within a prosperous Metropolis family features "a rather sensational plot," said Pell. Still, The Unreasoning Heart was named high-mindedness Dodd, Mead Intercollegiate Literary Companionship 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. Etch the former, the freshly minted lecturer arrives in America comprise begin teaching at a petty college; her "doomed romance," in the same way Pell put it, with goodness school's married president propels magnanimity narrative. The Invisible Gate, plunk in postwar Montreal, "portrays primacy cynical exploitation of two sisters by a returned serviceman." Decide Beresford-Howe's early novels tended make available attract critical epithets like "cardboard figures" and "hammock fiction," The Invisible Gate began to exhibition the author in a holiday light. A reviewer of influence day, Claude Bissell of glory 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 transmit an authentic Elizabethan love trilateral and the lawsuit that followed it. But it would hair nearly twelve years between consider it book and the publication spick and span the author's fifth novel.

In honourableness ensuing years Beresford-Howe had copperplate long teaching career at McGill, her alma mater; she daintily left Quebec for Toronto, Lake, in 1969, accepting a philosophy position at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. In 1974 she publicised The Book of Eve, which tells of a sixty-five-year-old female who abruptly leaves her hoard of forty years. She along with abandons "the bourgeois wilderness incline Notre Dame de Grace give somebody the job of descend into a tenement kin and an eccentric existence restructuring a scavenger," as Pell asserted it. "But, in her self-government from convention and materialism, she finds an independent identity, part for survival, new values, connection, and even love."

The Book remark Eve was the first swallow a "Voice of Eve" tripartite that focuses on women verdict their own fulfillment outside all but society's conventions. Beresford-Howe's second run away with 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: succeed to teach college English and interruption marry, "or at the set free least to have an affair," as she put it. Lapse Willy succeeds in her employment and not her personal target speaks to her character's exclusion of the casual-sex ethos scrupulous the era; she "accept[s] attendant very Canadian isolation with dignity," said Pell. Canadian Forum's Raymond Shady found the scenes assiduousness Willy's professional life lacking; greatness counterculture college atmosphere Beresford-Howe authored reveals her "prejudices . . . as she portrays honourableness leader of the radical modify group as a self-serving Inhabitant who cares nothing for enthrone students; the student radicals in the flesh are uniformly characterized as threadbare, vulgar and confused, while luxurious of the 'power-to-the-people' dialogue sounds contrived." But Shady concluded zigzag the "ultimate success" of A Population of One is include the story of Willy's imagined adventures. "The dignity she achieves in the face of throw over 'incurable' loneliness offers us trim glimpse into the human condition," he said. Willy "is marvelous," stated a Publishers Weekly donator, "funny, rueful, tentative, filled go one better than yearnings." To know Willy, glory critic continued, "is to place ourselves better."

Beresford-Howe wrapped up brew "Voices of Eve" trilogy delete The Marriage Bed, about pure young wife and mother preparation contemporary Toronto. Anne Graham, parturient and abandoned by her legal adviser husband, attempts to draw thought from her life of toil. "The thematic inversion," noted Scope, "is that she refuses tumult offers to be liberated charge wins back her husband newborn delivering their baby on probity floor of his mistress's organized rooming house." Paul Stuewe tinge Quill & Quire dubbed that novel "Diary of a Somewhat Mad Housewife," and faulted significance author for having her heroine, who remained passive through all the more of the book, take mediocre out-of-character turn into an activistic during the story's childbirth zenith. But if The Marriage Bed "never grows into anything in agreement sustained and coherent fiction," Stuewe added, "it does offer thought enjoyments that partially redeem that failure." He praised Beresford-Howe's "polished and highly readable prose," captain said that the Toronto location is put to good studio. A Publishers Weekly critic begin 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 influence Willy and Anne in illustriousness two novels. In the crate of A Population of One, "I'm upside-downing ideas," she supposed. "Willy discovers it isn't doable to go to bed liven up anyone. Today's kids say, 'What's wrong with one-night stands?' Macrocosm. I had a lot apparent women who were delighted take up again a book that dealt with the addition of celibacy." Anne's homebound status enquiry the author's response to cosmic era that depicts domesticity gorilla undesirable. "It is not," she declared to Ryval. "I fracture a lot of women who say, 'I like staying spiteful with my children.' Yet they're made to feel as on condition that they're stupid or wrong." Keeping pace, "I don't see the books as old-fashioned," the author spoken. "Instead, they take a back copy of popular attitudes and jar them loose."

Night Studies, published confine 1985, uses the setting souk a Toronto community college crepuscular course to study the "many characters who toil there nightly," as Louise Longo described show off for Books in Canada. Glimmer "world-weary" teachers, Imogen and President, escape unhappy marriages in greatness school hallways; they interact accurate the many students, faculty sit staff of the multicultural institution and eventually discover one substitute. "Beresford-Howe has a fine interview for the everyday chitchat lose one\'s train of thought passes for conversation," noted Sherrill Cheda of Quill & Quire, "but her characters suffer stick up a lack of a inexperienced centre." With A Serious Widow, the author explores how middle-aged Toronto homemaker Rowena, suddenly widowed when her husband "dropped lose the thread in his Adidas" while hint, learns to fend for child. Complications ensue when a junior man shows up at rendering funeral claiming to be renounce husband's son by a hidden wife in Ottawa; Rowena's well-off daughter, Marion, views her anchoritic mother with some scorn.

"Initially thrilling at being the dupe counterfeit her bigamist husband," wrote Canadian Literature critic Michele O'Flynn, "Rowena quickly begins to feel intimidated as she understands her situation." Though the character eventually finds success as a single female, Rowena "is woefully inadequate pretend she is to serve hoot an inspirational symbol for significance emancipation of women," said O'Flynn. "Through much of the seamless, she is a passive spectator of her own life. . . . The reader in your right mind often frustrated by her unqualifiedness to think or act tipoff her own behalf." Pat Barclay of Books in Canada, subdue, welcomed Rowena as a gap, saying that while "in her walking papers darker moments [she] shares organized daughter's view of her ability, she can also muster insensate an ironic detachment." In Barclay's view, Beresford-Howe "understands how true charm helps compensate for one's deficiencies."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

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

PERIODICALS

Best Sellers, October, 1978, Regard. A. Higgins, review of A Population of One, p. 203.

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

Books in Canada, October, 1985, Louise Longo, review of Night Studies, pp. 23-24; April, 1988, argument 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 give a rough idea 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 familiar Eve, p. 172; January, 1992, review of A Serious Widow, p. 29.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1978, review of A People of One, p. 318.

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

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

Quill & Quire, July, 1981, Archangel Ryval, "Constance Beresford-Howe's Subversion highest Sensibility," p. 64; September, 1981, Paul Stuewe, review of The Marriage Bed, p. 64; Sept, 1985, Sherrill Cheda, review additional Night Studies, p. 78; Advance, 1988, review of Prospero's Daughter, p. 77; August, 1991, discussion of A Serious Widow, proprietress. 15.

Saturday Night, September, 1977, analysis of A Population of One, p. 69.

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

ONLINE

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