5 Female Canadian Authors You Should Read

In the early 1970s, Margaret Atwood turned her attention to Susanna Moodie, a Victorian woman and writer who emigrated to Upper Canada in 1832. With The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) Atwood asks a seemingly simple question: What does it mean to be Canadian? Over the years, different Canadian authors have answered it in their own uniquely different ways.

Although Montreal-born Mavis Gallant spent most of her life in Paris, the province of Québec is a constant presence in her stories. So is Ontario in the works of Alice Munro, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Rooted in their Eurocentric upbringing and ancestry, their understanding of Canadian identity differs to a large extent from those of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and performer, and Carleigh Baker, of Cree-Métis and Icelandic descent.

To grasp the beauty of Mavis Gallant’s (1922-2014) prose, one need only read this short paragraph from Voices Lost in Snow, one of her most powerful and moving short stories: “Two persons descend the street, stepping carefully. The child, reminded every day to keep her hands still, gesticulates wildly – there is the flesh of a red mitten. I will never overtake this pair. Their voices are lost in snow.”

Voices Lost in Snow introduces us to a world where “dark riddles filled the corners of life because no enlightenment was thought required.” Linnet Muir, growing up with an absent mother, tries to understand what happened to her father, and how and where he died.

If this brief excerpt were not enough, here is another passage from the same story where Gallant describes the Montreal of Linnet’s childhood: “The end of the afternoon had a particular shade of color then, which is not tinted by distance or enhancement but has to do with how streets were lighted. Lamps were still gas, and their soft gradual blooming at dusk made the sky turn a peacock blue that slowly deepened to marine, then indigo. This uneven light falling in blurred pools gave the snow it touched a quality of phosphorescence, beyond which were night shadows in which no one lurked. There were few cars, little sound. A fresh snowfall would lie in the streets in a way that seemed natural.”

Few other authors have described Montreal as powerfully as Gallant did in her (partly autobiographical) collection of short stories, Montreal Stories. As simple and intuitive as the title may be, it is a gateway to a complex world, one that Gallant experienced and observed as a young woman growing up in Montreal.

An expatriate in her own lifetime, she is now widely (and finally) recognized as one of the best Canadian short story writers of the 20th century (if not the best). Gallant was born Mavis de Trafford Young in 1922, the only child of Benedictine Wiseman and Anglo-Scottish Albert Stewart Roy de Trafford Young, who died of kidney disease when she was young.

In the so-called “Linnet Muir” stories, we catch glimpses of her relationship with her father, her impressions of him, and her memories of the time spent with this now-distant figure. Linnet Muir is a fictional character, however, and Gallant has always been adamant about not using (overtly) autobiographical material in her writing. Far from being the only city portrayed in her stories, Montreal is perhaps the one she describes best, with its poverty, its unique blend of American and British culture, of English Protestants and French Catholics.

The other is Paris, where she landed at the age of 28 and where she lived most of her life. Before Paris, there was New York City, the metropolis where she had lived between 1935 and 1940, where she had graduated from high school, where she had “heard people laughing in a cinema” for the first time. At 18, however, she moved back to Montreal, alone.

The New Yorker published her Madeline’s Birthday in September 1951. This would be the beginning of a long-lasting business relationship between Gallant and the renowned American magazine, which published 116 of her stories in the following decades. Her first story collection, The Other Paris, appeared in 1956, followed three years later by the first of only two novels Gallant wrote in her life, Green Water, Green Sky (the second, A Fairly Good Time, was published in 1970). In her novels and short stories, characters seek “the Other Paris,” the hidden vision or sacred knowledge they desperately want to be a part of. Strangers in a foreign country, they are extremely human.

For his 2021 film, The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson based the character of fictional reporter Lucinda Krementz, played by Frances McDormand, on Mavis Gallant, a testimony to the ever-lasting impact of Gallant’s figure and works in the Western world.

If Gallant is the voice of bilingual Québec, Alice Munro is that of Ontario. Most of her stories are set in Huron County, in southwestern Ontario, where she was born and raised. Lives of Girls and Women (1971), for instance, chronicles the life of Del Jordan from childhood (Chapter One, The Flat Roads) to adolescence (Chapter Five, Changes and Ceremonies), from the discovery of sex (Chapters Six and Seven, Lives of Girls and Women and Baptizing) to adulthood (Baptizing, the final chapter, and the Epilogue, The Photographer).

The book also chronicles the life of her mother Ada (“Princess Ada”), her father, aunts, and her grounded Uncle Craigh, as well as those misfits and drunks living on Flat Roads. Among them, there is Uncle Benny, the Jordans’ neighbor who embarks on an eccentric trip to Toronto in search of his wife.

Underlying the lives of the people of Jubilee is the contrast between the town and its surroundings, the contrast between two worlds, a division that constantly urges Del to decide which world to embrace. She will make her choice in the epilogue, The Photographer. Although Lives of Girls and Women certainly has the structure of a Bildungsroman and some autobiographical elements (Huron County is one of the most obvious), it is above all a multifaceted portrayal of human life, and of the inner workings of small towns.

Alice Munro, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, surely is a “master of the contemporary short story.” She’s also a remarkable observer of human life and behavior, a quality that shines through in all of her collections of short stories, from Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974) to The Moons of Jupiter (1982), from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) to The View from Castle Rock (2006), a partly fictionalized recollection of the lives of the Laidlaws, Munro’s forebears who emigrated from Scotland to Canada in the 17th century.

One city, two writers. Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson was born (and raised) in Wingham, Ontario in 1971, the same town where teacher Anne Clarke Laidlaw gave birth to Alice Munro on a sunny day in July 1931. Their lives, their education, and their writing could not be more different from each other. Nonetheless, for both, literature seems to have been the springboard for studying and possibly understanding the past and its implications on the present.

This is the delicate balance at the heart of Leanne Simpson’s works. While Munro offers us a glimpse into the lives of white Canadians of European descent, Simpson, with her knife-sharp prose, catapults the reader into an entirely different world, one that has for too long been belittled and overlooked, that of Indigenous Canadians. Of Mississauga and Scottish ancestry, Simpson is a member of the Anishinabek Nation in what is now Ontario.

Her ancestors, also known as the “Salmon people” or “the people of the big river mouths,” have occupied the northern shore of Lake Ontario since time immemorial. Their ancestral territories extended westward to the northern shore of Lake Erie to Gananoque in the east.

Simpson has a penchant for evocative titles that manage to bring together the experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Her acclaimed debut is titled Islands of Decolonial Love, Stories & Songs (2013), and was followed by This Accident of Being Lost: Song and Stories (2017), which, as the title suggests, is a collection of short stories and songs. The shadow of colonialism is ever-present, repeatedly clashing with the characters’ proudly Indigenous identities and legacies.

What does it mean to be an Indigenous Canadian citizen in a society like that of North America, which for centuries has portrayed First Nations in stereotypical ways, belittling their cultures and skills?

This is one of the many questions Simpson asks in her short story Doing the Right Thing, in which her protagonist, an Indigenous woman, attends a firearms safety class taught by a non-Indigenous instructor, whom she describes as the “living, breathing stereotype of the white man.”

A writer and remarkable storyteller, Leanne Simpson is also a songwriter, musician, and performer. Although How To Steal a Canoe can be read as a poem, it is essentially a song that honors the strength of Indigenous women. Colonial dispossession goes hand in hand with colonial violation of Indigenous bodies. In How To Steal a Canoe, Indigenous women’s bodies speak back to colonialism, colonial dispossession, and cultural appropriation of Indigenous Knowledge. Kwe, the protagonist of Doing the Right Thing, is not just a woman trying to maintain her dignity in an environment marked by colonial prejudice.

Rather, she contains within herself, within her body and name, the preconditions for Indigenous resurgence. As We Have Always Done (2017) is an in-depth academic study of Indigenous resurgence against contemporary colonial values. However, it is not (and could never be) “an academic book in a Western sense, because in many ways it does not conform to and reproduce straight, white, cisgendered, masculinist academic conventions, theories, and citational practices, and therefore knowledge” (As We Have Always Done, 30).

The same can be said of A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin (2021) and of Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (2011), which explores how the Nishnaabeg language, intellectual practices, and Michi Saagiig Creation Stories should and could lead Canada towards a fair and true reconciliation.

Of Cree-Métis and Icelandic descent, Carleigh Baker was born and raised in British Columbia, on the ancestral lands of the Stó:lō people, part of the Coast Salish First Nation, who have long inhabited the Fraser Valley and lower Fraser Canyon. She currently lives on the unceded territories of Tsleil-Waututh (səlilwətaɬ), Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh), and Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) peoples in British Columbia. In the Halqemeylem language, Stó:lō means “river.”

Bad Endings, her debut collection of short stories, begins with a quote from Vancouver writer and Indigenous activist Lee Maracle (1950-2021) that sets the tone for the whole collection: “Fish is the hub of all our memories.” The lives of Baker’s characters are deeply influenced, shaped, and geographically linked to British Columbia, to its freezing rains and lush forests. Yet, there is something universal and extremely human about them that transcends time and space.

The world Baker describes is one we all know and can relate to. A world in which Tinder and Starbucks coexist alongside the thunderless rain of the Pacific Northwest. The first story in Bad Endings, War of Attrition, begins with an ending, “My marriage is ending and it’s my fault. In the other room, Andrew is snoring. I’m on the couch.” A woman sits on the couch while her husband sleeps in the bedroom. Eventually, she gets up, makes herself coffee, gets ready for work and leaves the house.

Many of Baker’s characters find solace in manual labor, which becomes a reason to live and survive even (and especially) when their lives are falling apart. There is a certain beauty in the way she describes the ordinary days of her characters, how they are transformed by the (relative) certainty of having to get up in the morning to go to work, and not because or despite it.

The overall atmosphere of Bad Endings is admittedly autobiographical. “My mom always used to say to me, ‘You’re bad at endings, you don’t end things when you should, and you’re bad at knowing when something is over.’” Who isn’t, at least once in their life?

In the same interview, Baker recalls that “when I was in my early thirties, I found myself in a bit of a situation – I was recovering from drug abuse and my marriage was essentially apocalyptic” and that “sometimes when (my) back (was) against the wall, that is, when (I had) nothing to lose, I found myself asking, ‘what would you do if you could do anything?’ and writing was the answer to that.” She also reveals that “when we got into writing, the first thing I noticed is that I wasn’t good at it right away, because no one ever is.” This realization made her want to improve. From practice and hard work comes a sense of purpose, for herself and her characters.

Margaret Atwood’s (1939 – ) first self-published poetry collection, Double Persephone, appeared in 1961. Her latest novel, The Testaments, was published in 2019. Her novels, poems, essays, children’s books, and short story collections have shaped the Canadian literary landscape for over six decades. For many, Margaret Atwood is the voice of Canadian identity, the writer who has managed to describe Canadian fears and aspirations in the most honest and uncompromising way.

Whereas for Leanne Simpson displacement is the colonial tool used by the Canadian government to push First Nations onto reserves and free land for settlers, Atwood sees it as the key to understanding Canada and Canadians. She investigates displacement from the perspective of the immigrants who left their homelands and landed in Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries.

She does so by putting herself in the shoes of Susanna Moodie (1805-1885), a British immigrant from Suffolk, England, who emigrated to Upper Canada in 1832 with her husband and daughter. 20 years later, in 1852, she published Roughing it in the Bush, an account of her early years in the North American continent. The book was a success and solidified her as a key figure in the Canadian literary canon.

More than a century later, Margaret Atwood decided to revisit her story and wrote The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), a collection of poems detailing Moodie’s first years in Canada and the evolution of her relationship with the wilderness. Atwood’s poetry collection focuses on themes of displacement, fear of the unknown, longing, and idealization of the past. Feelings that are at the heart of The Immigrants and that every immigrant has experienced at least once in his or her life.

If this is true for any immigrant, it is especially true for Susanna Moodie, a Victorian woman with Victorian values transplanted into the North American wilderness, “a large darkness,” as Atwood describes it in Further Arrivals. As we proceed through the different sections of the book, and as Mrs. Moodie’s personal journey progresses, the land gradually loses its terrifying essence. Moodie comes to make peace with it, to recognize that it might indeed possess its own logic, its own order.

When her son drowns in the Moira River, her relationship with the Canadian land takes a new turn. “I planted him in this country like a flag,” Atwood writes in the opening poem of the second section, Journal II, which covers the years 1840-1871. The rest of Mrs. Moodie’s life will revolve around that flag and the ground in which it was planted.

“Whether the wilderness is / real or not / depends on who lives there,” Atwood writes in Further Arrivals, one of the poems making up The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Her works are part of a long tradition of Canadian women writers who have shaped and continue to shape the Canadian literary canon, questioning what it means to be Canadian. Here are some of them you might want to check out:

• Lee Maracle (1950-2021);
• P.K. Page (1916-2010);
• Margaret Laurence (1926-1987);
• Jane Urquhart (1949 – );
• Dionne Brand (1953 – );
• Miriam Toews (1964 – );
• Katherena Vermette (1977 – )