The Tattooed Woman

by Marian Engel

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, Canada, Gender Studies

208 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 1985

About the author

Canadian 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.

Reviews

[Erika Nerdypants · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have fallen in love with Marian Engel. Her prose is simple and beautiful, her subjects in this book are ordinary Canadian women at various life stages. She is such a clever writer, exposing her characters in layers, so that by the end of the stories, you feel like you know them intimately. What is it like to be cheated on, get cancer, become absent minded and get old? Ask Engel, one of her characters will tell you with breath-taking precision. Her women are foolish and often wise, exposed and vulnerable with steel skeletons. You want to protect them, encourage them, and find that you're cheering for yourself as much as for them. A gem by a genius.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good book. I tend to avoid short stories and was reminded why, i get impatient when they are inconsistent. There were a few good ones here though, some very dark and nihilistic stories about troubled people trying to act 'normal', which I often like. Worth reading. I think I read something about this writer in Bitch magazine.

[Falina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read and loved a couple of Engel's novels, and I loved a few of these stories ("Share and Share Alike" and "Gemini, Gemino" were both great). But some of the stories irritated me by being too "artistic" (i.e. they seemed pretentious and I wasn't able to get past the vague symbolism to unpack any meaning). I love symbolism and allegory but it annoys me when authors think they don't need to be accessible--the best authors make the surface entertaining and invite people to look deeper to their true ideas, rather than being murky and incomprehensible unless you already happen to know what they're talking about. It's just sloppy. However, despite being annoyed I will probably go on to read everything Engel has written. When she's good, she's amazing.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Troubled heroes, bathed in prose. Easy to read; hard to swallow.