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The Glassy Sea
Publisher's description:
The Glassy Sea is a beautifully orchestrated novel of one extraordinary woman's spiritual odyssey, unfolding in the midst of a crisis of faith and emotion, a dark night of the soul that lasts a season and spans a lifetime.
There is compassionate mastery in Ms Engel's full-blooded characterization of Marguerite Heber, an Anglican nun who is, first and foremost, a woman--one who has experienced marriage, motherhood, and the tragic break-up of the family. Her crucible produces a startling and utterly unorthodox resolution, a vision born of her own turbulent experience, geared to the world and embodying all the elements of her singular character.
This is an important novel, written with humour, wit, and enduring humanity, a moving, perceptive assessment of the many dimensions of woman's relationship to herself, to man, and to society.
The Glassy Sea is a beautifully orchestrated novel of one extraordinary woman's spiritual odyssey, unfolding in the midst of a crisis of faith and emotion, a dark night of the soul that lasts a season and spans a lifetime.
There is compassionate mastery in Ms Engel's full-blooded characterization of Marguerite Heber, an Anglican nun who is, first and foremost, a woman--one who has experienced marriage, motherhood, and the tragic break-up of the family. Her crucible produces a startling and utterly unorthodox resolution, a vision born of her own turbulent experience, geared to the world and embodying all the elements of her singular character.
This is an important novel, written with humour, wit, and enduring humanity, a moving, perceptive assessment of the many dimensions of woman's relationship to herself, to man, and to society.
- GenresFiction
167 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
91 people want to read
About the author
Marian Engel
22 books78 followersCanadian novelist, short-story and children's fiction writer, Marian Engel was a passionate activist for the national and international writer’s cause.
She was the first chair of the Writer’s Union of Canada (1973–74) and helped found the Public Lending Right Commission. From 1975-1977, she served on the City of Toronto Book Award Committee (an award she won in 1981 for Lunatic Villas) and the Canadian Book and Periodical Development Council.
In 1982 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
She married Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio producer Howard Engel in 1962 and, upon their return to Toronto from England in 1964, began to raise a family--twins William Lucas Passmore and Charlotte Helen Arabella--and to pursue a writing career. Marian and Howard separated in 1975 and divorced in 1977.
Engel was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta (1977–1978) and at the University of Toronto (1980–1982).
Her first novel, No Clouds of Glory, was published in 1968. She wrote two children's books: Adventures of Moon Bay Towers (1974) and My name is not Odessa Yarker (1977). Her most famous and controversial novel was Bear(1976), a tale of erotic love between a librarian and a bear, for which she won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction in 1976.
From 1965 to her death in 1985 she corresponded with literary peers and friends such as Hugh MacLennan, Robertson Davies, Dennis Lee, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Matt Cohen, Robert Weaver, Graeme Gibson and more. Some of this correspondence can be found in Dear Hugh, Dear Marian: The MacLennan-Engel Correspondence (1995) and Marian Engel: Life in Letters (2004).
After her death in 1985, the Writer's Development Trust of Canada instituted the Marian Engel Award, which was presented annually to a woman writer in mid-career. The Engel and Findley Awards are no longer awarded separately, but were combined into the new Writers’ Trust Notable Author Award as of 2008.
She was the first chair of the Writer’s Union of Canada (1973–74) and helped found the Public Lending Right Commission. From 1975-1977, she served on the City of Toronto Book Award Committee (an award she won in 1981 for Lunatic Villas) and the Canadian Book and Periodical Development Council.
In 1982 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
She married Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio producer Howard Engel in 1962 and, upon their return to Toronto from England in 1964, began to raise a family--twins William Lucas Passmore and Charlotte Helen Arabella--and to pursue a writing career. Marian and Howard separated in 1975 and divorced in 1977.
Engel was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta (1977–1978) and at the University of Toronto (1980–1982).
Her first novel, No Clouds of Glory, was published in 1968. She wrote two children's books: Adventures of Moon Bay Towers (1974) and My name is not Odessa Yarker (1977). Her most famous and controversial novel was Bear(1976), a tale of erotic love between a librarian and a bear, for which she won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction in 1976.
From 1965 to her death in 1985 she corresponded with literary peers and friends such as Hugh MacLennan, Robertson Davies, Dennis Lee, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Matt Cohen, Robert Weaver, Graeme Gibson and more. Some of this correspondence can be found in Dear Hugh, Dear Marian: The MacLennan-Engel Correspondence (1995) and Marian Engel: Life in Letters (2004).
After her death in 1985, the Writer's Development Trust of Canada instituted the Marian Engel Award, which was presented annually to a woman writer in mid-career. The Engel and Findley Awards are no longer awarded separately, but were combined into the new Writers’ Trust Notable Author Award as of 2008.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 10, 2013
The first book to be read off my "pick it up and dust it off" shelf: books that have been sitting around for dozens of years, forgotten and neglected. Hard covers - some of 'em first editions - that I've picked up at flea markets, second-hand bookstores or that have been handed down to me.
There are some insane treasures on my shelves -- unloved, unread -- and this is one of them.
It almost made my heart stop, it is so good.
Marian Engel - infamous for parlaying a detailed account of the sexual gymnastics involved in a brown bear and a librarian's love affair in the great north woods into a Governor General's award - writes like a raft of Canadian women authors (Atwood, Laurence, Munro even) used to write. Deeply introspective, crafted and poetic, genre and gender role-defying, imagery and insight combining in this ... this ... extraordinary way. Honest, mind- and heart-blowing accounts of women's experience that - to me at least - reads as personal, female, and very Canadian.
I say "used to" for two reasons: 1) because Engel died in 1985 leaving behind a small, diverse, largely overlooked body of work which is now a little hard to get your hands on. And you should, despite 2) it's dated, rooted in a time and place - and concerns - that don't really exist anymore or at least are not expressed in the same way as they were when she was writing.
Her contemporaries evolved, bringing their artistry and insights into new forms and expressions. Especially, of course, Atwood.
This is what you need to know: The Glassy Sea and The Handmaid's Tale share a common ancestor.
TGS is the account of a woman - born Rita to humble, bigoted, Protestant Ontario stock - who becomes Sister Mary Pelagia (the RCs and high Anglicans among you will have more background to understand that name) in a nine-member Anglican Order, the Eglantines. As they begin to die off, she leaves that world for 'the' world: one of sexual, spiritual, and emotional crises.
The prologue and epilogue frame the main story of her life retold in a letter to her Bishop, written shortly after she's made the decision to I forgive the ending - which wraps the story up in a way that felt too practical, too prosaic and too 'preachy' - for all that went before it, because of all that went before it.
It is a unique life's journey that speaks to me at the deepest levels. It is simply everything I read for, packed into 167 pages.
Rest in peace, Marian.
There are some insane treasures on my shelves -- unloved, unread -- and this is one of them.
It almost made my heart stop, it is so good.
Marian Engel - infamous for parlaying a detailed account of the sexual gymnastics involved in a brown bear and a librarian's love affair in the great north woods into a Governor General's award - writes like a raft of Canadian women authors (Atwood, Laurence, Munro even) used to write. Deeply introspective, crafted and poetic, genre and gender role-defying, imagery and insight combining in this ... this ... extraordinary way. Honest, mind- and heart-blowing accounts of women's experience that - to me at least - reads as personal, female, and very Canadian.
I say "used to" for two reasons: 1) because Engel died in 1985 leaving behind a small, diverse, largely overlooked body of work which is now a little hard to get your hands on. And you should, despite 2) it's dated, rooted in a time and place - and concerns - that don't really exist anymore or at least are not expressed in the same way as they were when she was writing.
Her contemporaries evolved, bringing their artistry and insights into new forms and expressions. Especially, of course, Atwood.
This is what you need to know: The Glassy Sea and The Handmaid's Tale share a common ancestor.
TGS is the account of a woman - born Rita to humble, bigoted, Protestant Ontario stock - who becomes Sister Mary Pelagia (the RCs and high Anglicans among you will have more background to understand that name) in a nine-member Anglican Order, the Eglantines. As they begin to die off, she leaves that world for 'the' world: one of sexual, spiritual, and emotional crises.
The prologue and epilogue frame the main story of her life retold in a letter to her Bishop, written shortly after she's made the decision to I forgive the ending - which wraps the story up in a way that felt too practical, too prosaic and too 'preachy' - for all that went before it, because of all that went before it.
It is a unique life's journey that speaks to me at the deepest levels. It is simply everything I read for, packed into 167 pages.
Rest in peace, Marian.
September 2, 2016
A few years ago, when I was living in a small basement suite in my hometown and my best friends were living in the slightly larger upstairs, I would sit on the deck in the backyard after work and read. One of the books I remember reading in that place most vividly was Bear by Marian Engel. I was enthralled by that book. I thought it was powerful, beautiful, and important - and so did many other Canadians at the time of its publication. Somehow, unfortunately, and likely because it is not found on the high school curriculum, it has become a great deal less popular. But it is a great book.
I thought the writer was great and powerful, I thought she understood the mixture of the writers responsibility to write about something and write about it well. I suppose, after dabbling into Engel's work a second time I still find this to be true, though I'm a good deal less convinced. Whereas Bear is taught and exciting, concise and brilliant, whereas it undermines everything we men understand about women's sexuality and about the Canadian relation to nature, The Glassy Sea is... predictable and ultimately uninteresting.
It is a confessional novel written from the perspective of a middle-aged woman, and it catalogues the changes in her life, from a disappointing and confusing childhood, to a disappointing and confusing experience in university, through a wonderful period of growth in a closed community of Anglican sisters, through a bad marriage and a horrible, short motherhood, and then back into the community of Anglican sisters. In being a confessional novel it shares many features with what might be called a Coming of Age novel, and that is worth noting, because Engel is a writer of the woman's experience in Canada, she is a writer who focuses on the barriers that women face(d) and the ways in which they overcome or are restricted by them. Quite often, for Engel, her characters are restricted. And this gives the book power in intrigue, and defines it by with sadness and melancholy. This tone seems appropriate for the novel and its goal, and I enjoyed it for what it taught me about the experiences of women (which is what I was hoping to learn about).
It falls into that bundle of fiction that was common in Canada when it was released - Ontario Gothic is what the body came to be known as, and many of the most important writers in the collective were women writing about women's experiences. Think Munro. Think Atwood. Add in Robertson Davies if you want a more masculine take on it - and he's just as good as Atwood (well, I would suggest he is better, to be honest). But this isn't about Davies, it is about Engel. And Engel is a fantastic writer. Unfortunately, though, it is nearly impossible to separate Engel from the Canadian milieu that she was writing within, and so I'll have to continue in that strain for a tiny bit longer. Forgive me.
Engel, as I have said, is a fantastic writer. She is concise, but powerful, and carries in her writing a spirit of the poet. Her sentences are lively, beautiful, simple, and then complex. Her paragraphs are short, to the point, but elusive in a way, as they are only building the reader towards a better understanding of the character. Somehow, Engel manages to write this confessional book without abandoning the idea of "showing and not telling" the reader everything the author knows about the character, and this is not a skill which all authors have. At times she reminds you of Atwood when Atwood is at her best - but, unlike Atwood, Engel is consistently of a very high standard.
But the book has this air to it that essentially feels like it has been done and read a great many times already, and that, as a result, it is not necessarily the most important book you'll ever read by a Canadian. It is, perhaps, too familiar, and too easy to read as a result of that familiarity. The pain and the sadness that characterizes the life of the confessor is diminished in power because, well, haven't I read this story about a woman's life before? Isn't this exactly as I have imagined that experience in the past when I have read other books by other Canadians novelists and when those books have helped me fill in the holes in the lives of my mother and grandmother and aunt and all the great women in my life? I just wish that the book was more original, or more radical. What I was hoping for was something closer to Bear and less like Surfacing, something more astonishing and less trapped in that moment in which it was written. But perhaps that means that I hope the book was something it never could have been.
A worthwhile read? Absolutely. A Canadian classic? Not quite. Has it turned me off of Engel? Not in the least.
I thought the writer was great and powerful, I thought she understood the mixture of the writers responsibility to write about something and write about it well. I suppose, after dabbling into Engel's work a second time I still find this to be true, though I'm a good deal less convinced. Whereas Bear is taught and exciting, concise and brilliant, whereas it undermines everything we men understand about women's sexuality and about the Canadian relation to nature, The Glassy Sea is... predictable and ultimately uninteresting.
It is a confessional novel written from the perspective of a middle-aged woman, and it catalogues the changes in her life, from a disappointing and confusing childhood, to a disappointing and confusing experience in university, through a wonderful period of growth in a closed community of Anglican sisters, through a bad marriage and a horrible, short motherhood, and then back into the community of Anglican sisters. In being a confessional novel it shares many features with what might be called a Coming of Age novel, and that is worth noting, because Engel is a writer of the woman's experience in Canada, she is a writer who focuses on the barriers that women face(d) and the ways in which they overcome or are restricted by them. Quite often, for Engel, her characters are restricted. And this gives the book power in intrigue, and defines it by with sadness and melancholy. This tone seems appropriate for the novel and its goal, and I enjoyed it for what it taught me about the experiences of women (which is what I was hoping to learn about).
It falls into that bundle of fiction that was common in Canada when it was released - Ontario Gothic is what the body came to be known as, and many of the most important writers in the collective were women writing about women's experiences. Think Munro. Think Atwood. Add in Robertson Davies if you want a more masculine take on it - and he's just as good as Atwood (well, I would suggest he is better, to be honest). But this isn't about Davies, it is about Engel. And Engel is a fantastic writer. Unfortunately, though, it is nearly impossible to separate Engel from the Canadian milieu that she was writing within, and so I'll have to continue in that strain for a tiny bit longer. Forgive me.
Engel, as I have said, is a fantastic writer. She is concise, but powerful, and carries in her writing a spirit of the poet. Her sentences are lively, beautiful, simple, and then complex. Her paragraphs are short, to the point, but elusive in a way, as they are only building the reader towards a better understanding of the character. Somehow, Engel manages to write this confessional book without abandoning the idea of "showing and not telling" the reader everything the author knows about the character, and this is not a skill which all authors have. At times she reminds you of Atwood when Atwood is at her best - but, unlike Atwood, Engel is consistently of a very high standard.
But the book has this air to it that essentially feels like it has been done and read a great many times already, and that, as a result, it is not necessarily the most important book you'll ever read by a Canadian. It is, perhaps, too familiar, and too easy to read as a result of that familiarity. The pain and the sadness that characterizes the life of the confessor is diminished in power because, well, haven't I read this story about a woman's life before? Isn't this exactly as I have imagined that experience in the past when I have read other books by other Canadians novelists and when those books have helped me fill in the holes in the lives of my mother and grandmother and aunt and all the great women in my life? I just wish that the book was more original, or more radical. What I was hoping for was something closer to Bear and less like Surfacing, something more astonishing and less trapped in that moment in which it was written. But perhaps that means that I hope the book was something it never could have been.
A worthwhile read? Absolutely. A Canadian classic? Not quite. Has it turned me off of Engel? Not in the least.
October 3, 2021
A life story of "a bitten woman on a muddy road" (11), packed into one long letter framed by the Prologue and Envoie, similarly as one's life is "a sentence between brackets" (143).
November 2, 2015
This gem was what I naively wanted when I picked "The virtue of selfishness " (Ayn Rand) up to read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews