Profiles in Canadian Literature 8: Volume 8

By Dundurn

Profiles in Canadian Literature is a wide-ranging series of essays on Canadian authors. Each profile acquaints the reader with the writer’s work, providing insight into themes, techniques, and special characteristics, as well as a chronology of the author’s life. Finally, there is a bibliography of primary works and criticism that suggests avenues for further study.

"I know of no better introduction to these writers, and the studies in question are full of basic information not readily obtainable elsewhere." -U of T Quarterly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jan 1, 1991
• ISBN: 9781554882700

Book preview

1982).

by

Lorraine M. York

Audrey Thomas once wrote an open letter to the Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay, in which she pointed out, I do not write confessional novels nor, I think, novels that are at their heart, self-obsessed. I’m very interested in contemporary women because I happen to be one ….¹ Livesay had commented, in an interview, that writers like Thomas, who were exploring women’s issues, especially that of women’s powerlessness in society, were somehow singing a one-note song, and that they should really be writing about all human beings. This notion is a familiar one, popping up in readers’ responses to writers like Thomas, Margaret Atwood, and Marian Engel; in the minds of some readers, at least, to write about women is to write about the marginal, the frivolous or self-indulgent. And when the writer uses the details of her life as ingredients in her fiction, as Thomas does, this objection is compounded: how dare the writer use the novel or short story to thrash out her own problems? But, as a close survey of her fiction will reveal, Audrey Thomas is right; her novels are not mere repositories for confession, nor are they self-obsessed. Rather, they are glimpses into the obsessions and power struggles of contemporary lives and relationships – a topic which could hardly be termed frivolous.

As Thomas reminded Livesay, the territory explored in her fiction is the world of the last five decades. Born in 1935, Thomas has given her readers penetrating insights about women growing up in the 1940s, marrying and starting to raise children in the late ’50s and ’60s, and coming to terms with marriage breakdown and life as a maturing woman in the ’70s and ’80s. For Thomas, that journey began, as it does for her character Isobel in Songs My Mother Taught Me, in southern New York State, the area surrounding Binghamton, the medium-sized city in which she was born. She has described her childhood as one of acute suffering, occasioned by the violent arguments of her parents. Time and again, Thomas and her sister would be asked to choose between mother and father, only to have the emotional scene cancelled and all-but-forgotten the next day. Now, as a writer and as a mature woman, she would probably recognize that some of her own fascination with the power struggles between men and women and, especially, with how those conflicts affect the children involved, is linked, in some way, with her own experience of childhood stress and marital warfare.

Photo courtesy of Stoddart

Education was one way out of such an untenable situation and, as it turned out, one step on the road to Thomas’s development as an artist. As a student, first at a New Hampshire boarding school at age fifteen, then at Smith College, Thomas embarked on the academic study of literature. But, as she has pointed out, most of the literature which she read at these institutions, especially at Smith, was written by men; her discovery of the works of Virginia Woolf was, for this reason, a revelation. Even so, when she decided to pursue graduate study in English literature at the University of British Columbia, she chose topics from the mainstream tradition, completing an M.A. thesis on Henry James, and undertaking but not completing a Ph.D. on Beowulf. This intellectual split in Thomas, between the mainstream tradition, authored mostly by men, and her own growing interest in women writers like Woolf and Doris Lessing, is a conflict which her own novels and stories dramatize. At the end of Mrs. Blood, for example, we find, in the last anguished moments of the narrator’s miscarriage, a veritable rag-bag of quotations from the great tradition of literature: Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet, John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, T.S. Eliot’s poetry. And though some readers have criticized this portion of the ending, labelling it unnecessarily academic, the point is that the narrator has, from the beginning, been characterized as a woman who has had to bear the weight of traditional assumptions about what women should do and be. The deluge of quotations from the literary tradition, therefore, reproduces this sense of woman buried under layers of age-old norms and expectations. Besides, a more recent protagonist in Thomas’s works, Alice from Intertidal Life, thinks, near the end of her journey through a painful marriage breakup, of a female literary ancestor, Thomas’s beloved Virginia Woolf, and identifies with Woolfs mental suffering. She even thinks of the lighthouse, that central symbol of Woolfs To the Lighthouse, as a symbol of stability amidst the storms of contemporary life, a stability which women are now, increasingly, claiming as their own: For who knows when the bridegroom cometh, and who, these days, wants always to be inside, tending the lamps, waiting for his soft knock upon the door?² The traditional biblical text of the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew 25:1-13) is here replaced by the improved lighthouse, beacon of women’s new sense of stability. Modern lighthouses can function practically unmanned (IL p. 271), Alice thinks, in a tongue-in-cheek punning reminder that the strongholds of literary and social tradition have also been unmanned and reclaimed by and for women.

Part of this work of reclamation and transformation of tradition is accomplished, of course, through women taking up the pen, something which Thomas did from an early age. She did not publish any of her work, however, until 1965, when a short story of hers appeared in the Atlantic Monthly; this was the story which would appear as the opening work in her first collection of stories, Ten Green Bottles. Even though Thomas has remarked on a couple of occasions that this story, If One Green Bottle … , is not one of her favourites and that she feels it is flawed, it provides a remarkable starting-point for a survey of her career. This story and the collection it opens introduce many of the thematic and technical concerns which fascinate her as an artist for the next few decades.

Though critics have written that Ten Green Bottles tends to favour the conventionally shaped, rounded-out short story with a twisty ending, If One Green Bottle … gives evidence of a young writer’s adept willingness to experiment. The story follows the meanderings of a woman’s mind while she is undergoing a painful miscarriage. Past and present mingle, and in the ellipses which break into the text on every line, we sense at once the waves of her pain, and the waves of memory:

Waves of pain now … positive whitecaps … breakers … Useless to try to remember … to look behind … to think. Swim for shore. Ignore the ringing in the ears… the eyes half blind with water … the waves breaking over the head. Just keep swimming… keep moving forward… rely on instinct … your sense of direction… don’t look back or forward… (TGB, p. 11)

For Thomas, already, memory is a painful act, one which the human swimmer tries to avoid in order to make progress; still, it is as inevitable an instinct and source of direction for Thomas’s characters as the acts of breathing and walking. It is fitting, then, that Thomas herself should navigate as a writer by coming to terms again and again with memory; as she has revealed, If One Green Bottle … was written out of the intensely painful personal memory of the miscarriage she suffered in Ghana. It was a memory to which she would return in her novels Mrs. Blood and Blown Figures.

As well as setting up her theory of memory as creative pain, this early short story shows us a writer who is intensely self-conscious about her writing, and who enjoys bringing that self-consciousness into the foreground of her fictions. Part-way through the story, the narrator addresses a parenthetical comment to her reader: You are not amused by my abstract speculations? Listen … I have more (TGB, p. 9). Just at the point where the typical reader, experiencing some disorientation in this sea of ellipses and memories, seems ready to panic and drown, the narrator acknowledges this probable response, and forces that reader to question his or her own desire to keep moving forward in the manner of the traditional short-story plot. For Thomas, swimming backwards, forwards, and sideways through memory is just as viable an act of creativity. In the novels and stories to come, Thomas continues to question the conventions which surround the novel and short story, conventions which assume that a writer must express his or her material using certain forms or rules. In the work of a writer so deeply interested in the forms and rules which often govern women’s lives in a patriarchal society, formal experimentation works in tandem with this political concern to great effect.

Audrey Thomas’s work of the 1970s was dominated by a project which her readers came to recognize as a trilogy: the novels Mrs. Blood (1970), Songs My Mother Taught Me (1973), and Blown Figures (1974). Here, the features of her fiction which were already apparent in the early stories -women’s lives and bodies, memory, and the breaking of formal rules – returned on a larger scale. In fact, the three novels, taken together, show the progressive disintegration of the traditional novel form. Songs My Mother Taught Me, which was written before but published after Mrs. Blood, and tells of Isobel Carpenter’s childhood and adolescence, is written as a fairly conventional novel in two parts. Mrs. Blood, which details the narrator’s experience of miscarriage in a hospital in Ghana, gives us a fragmented first-person speaker who is, in the miscarriage scene at the very end of the novel, completely overtaken by the fragmentary. In Blown Figures, it is as though we picked up where we left off, with the fragments of thoughts, memories, and literary references which close Mrs. Blood. Now, the narrator is returning, psychologically and, perhaps, physically, to Africa to revisit the scene of her loss. The text is now entirely composed of fragments, as is the psyche of the emotionally scarred woman; the reader is made much more aware of this connection between text and psyche when some of these short snippets are placed, alone, on a single page. The traditional novel form, Thomas seems to suggest, is not able to contain this tale of a woman’s disintegration, for it suggests the finely crafted progression through introduction, complication, climax, and denouement to resolution. Her women, instead, often journey from apparent resolutions to radical questioning and loss of certainty; the form must therefore do the same.

Even in the first novel in the trilogy, Songs My Mother Taught Me, there are hints of Thomas’s frustration with the traditional narrative thread. In this tale of a young girl caught up in a domestic situation which features an ineffectual father and a mother subject to sudden rages. Thomas gives us a twentieth-century rendition of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, that nineteenth-century primer of childhood woe. (She has expressed her admiration for Dickens’s novel in interviews.) Still, fragmentation creeps into this text just as surely as it invades Isobel’s home life; suddenly, at the end of chapter 6, for example, we turn the page to find, not chapter 7, but a short passage on a separate page:

Isobel, do you remember when she smashed the bathroom mirror with a cold-cream jar?

No.

Of course you do. The frame hung there for days and one night, brushing your teeth, you chanced to look up and saw only a blank piece of cardboard and not your face. Your face had disappeared.

I remember. I thought it was an omen at the time. (Songs, p. 94)

Here is fragmentation indeed; one part of Isobel, the questioning, past-seeking side, interrogates the reluctant side which desires only to forget the mother’s act. And the image of the smashed mirror reflecting only a partial, splintered vision of Isobel is the physical embodiment of the shattered psyche this internal dialogue is seeking to heal. Finally, though, the two sides manage a momentary reconciliation through the agent of memory – I remember. Even though this agent brings pain, it brings psychic healing as well. How appropriate that we are given this parable of disintegration and reintegration through memory in a fragmentary passage which we, as readers, must strive to integrate in our reading of the novel we have in our hands. Thomas may not yet be placing single sentences or groups of words on separate pages as she does in Blown Figures, but she is moving ever closer to that practice, and ever further away from the classically constructed plot.

Mrs. Blood continues this emphasis on psychic fragmentation by having the narrator split herself into Mrs. Blood and Mrs. Thing, two personae that roughly approximate the two Isobels in the passage above from Songs My Mother Taught Me. Mrs. Blood is the medium of memory and Mrs. Thing her nervously resisting partner who lives, uneasily, in the present. Past and present meet in the last scene of the novel, where we are simultaneously shown the present miscarriage and the memory of the events leading up to an earlier abortion. Thomas manages this simultaneous telling through the layering of the telephone call which Mrs. Blood made to the father of her aborted child years ago, and her present grief over the miscarriage she is now undergoing:

   Only silence. Richard!

Oh, Jason, I’m so sorry.

       Get rid of it,

         he said. (MB, p. 220)

Two stories overlap, and the novel form, with its traditional emphasis on consecutive narration, strains to accommodate them. This strain snaps in Blown Figures; one of the figures which is blown in this work is the novel itself.

Besides marking Thomas’s increasing frustration with traditional forms of narrative, the trilogy resurrects another feature of her early stories: her fascination with Africa. In stories such as Xanadu and Omo from Ten Green Bottles, Thomas explores the problematic relationship between characters from abroad and a challenging new environment which they have trouble piecing together. Africa becomes yet another confusing splintered mirror in Thomas’s work; it is a symbolic land whose symbols resist the act of deciphering. This is no doubt why Thomas refers to the African continent, in an interview, as the other side of ourselves … the dream world, [where] things seem to be the same, but they’re not.³ Looked at in this way, the three novels show us a woman moving from west to east, further and further into her psyche, further and further into a land which, like the world of dreams, is difficult to interpret. In order to navigate this strange land, the traveller must reach back into the past, just as psychoanalytic therapy aims to convince the stubborn side of the psyche (that other half of Isobel we saw in Songs My Mother Taught Me) that the past must be relived and retrieved.

Even so, Thomas doesn’t offer us the diagnosis and resolution which therapists like Freud and her own favourite, Jung, tended to do. Once one uncovers the past, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the psychic split will heal itself. In Blown Figures, the main character is not able to abolish her fears and anguish with the magic incantation of I remember. This is part of Thomas’s experimentation of the 1970s; she resists giving her character’s severely divided psyche a final unity, just as she resists the traditional pull of the novel form towards final unity, the desirable happy ending.

The other element of Thomas’s experimental fiction which makes itself felt in the early stories, her self-consciousness about the act of writing, does not lose itself in her work of the 1970s. In 1971 she published two interlocking novels, Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island, which show her continuing fascination with the process of making fiction. Munchmeyer shows us a graduate student with dreams of writing a novel undergoing various nightmarish experiences; Prospero on the Island gives us the outer framework of this tale, the female writer Miranda who is writing a text called Munchmeyer. This boxes-within-boxes form of fiction gives us Thomas at her most explicitly self-conscious, meditating in both texts on the implications of mixing autobiographical event and fiction, and on the creativity of male and female writers.

As Thomas moved into the later 1970s, this playfulness filled her shorter fictions as well. In the short story Initram, from the 1977 collection Ladies & Escorts, the narrator begins by commenting explicitly on the story preceding it in the collection:

Writers are terrible liars. There are nicer names for it, of course, but liars will do. They take a small incident and blow it up, like a balloon – puff puff – and the out-of-work man who comes to ask if he can cut the grass ends up in their story as an out-of-control grey-faced, desperate creature who hurls himself through the garden gate and by his sheer presence wrecks a carefully arranged afternoon between a married woman and her intended lover. (LE, p. 88)

After thus providing her reader with a synopsis of the preceding story, the narrator begins a series of paragraphs (four in all), each of which begins with the phrase, The truth is … . Each of these statements, however, conflicts with the others (the truth is, she imagined the man; the truth is he was only a man mowing a neighbour’s lawn; the truth is that the man really was just as sinister as he is in the story which she has written). How can all these be true? Thomas’s point is, precisely, that they cannot, and that one cannot apply the conventional notions of truth and falsehood we tend to use in our own everyday lives to the worlds of fiction, where things are not merely true or false but are, rather, fabricated, true insofar as the fiction itself is concerned.

In this respect, Thomas’s view of art closely resembles that of two other well-known short-story writers in Canada, John Metcalf and Alice Munro, writers who themselves comment self-consciously, at times, about the truth of fiction as distinct from everyday notions of truth and falsehood. As Munro once wrote in an essay entitled, What Is Real?,

The answer seems to be as confusing as ever. Lots of true answers are. Yes and no. Yes, I use bits of what is real, in the sense of being really there and really happening, in the world, as most people see it, and I transform it into something that is really there and really happening, in my story.⁴

Like Audrey Thomas, Munro often has to defend her fiction against those readers who object to her use of autobiographical material; this essay is her way of arguing that her fiction is more than an attempt to reflect everyday experience. So, although Thomas doesn’t particularly belong to a school or movement of writers, her work, especially that of the 1970s, shows her experimenting, like Alice Munro, Clark Blaise, and John Metcalf, with art’s power to transform – not reproduce – felt experience. This she does by exploring, like those three other writers, the shadowy, exciting areas where autobiography and fiction meet, a natural sort of borderline area for an author to delve into if he or she is fascinated by the possibility that we fictionalize much of our experience in telling it.

A feature of Thomas’s work which makes its appearance in the late ’70s is her interest in the previous decade, the 1960s and, more particularly, the idealistic hopes of the so-called hippie or flower children generation. In stories like Rapunzel and A Monday Dream at Alameda Park, from Ladies & Escorts, Thomas gives us her first studies of this generation, its search for new experiences, open relationships, and heightened sensitivity through new stimuli (travel, meditation, drugs). Increasingly, in her fiction, though, Thomas presents these seekers in a pathetic or negative light; their searches are often naïve at best, or downright futile at worst. The wandering innocent Rapunzel, in the story of that name, for example, comes up against a tough fact which she cannot ignore: rape. Her soft voice, a trademark of Thomas’s ’60s-ish characters, struggles in bringing out this hard word rape (LE, p. 78). Other naïve searchers in Thomas’s fiction include the figure of the older man who is drawn to the dreams of the ’60s, and the love-child way of life. The professor in A Monday Dream at Alameda Park is one such middle-aged seeker, as is the husband Peter in Intertidal Life. Both works include the same snippet of dialogue: the former wife declaring that it was dope rather than the younger woman that has turned him on (LE, p. 118; IL, pp. 22-23).

But by the time we get to the 1984 novel, Intertidal Life, Thomas’s view of the post-’60s flower children who are trying to recapture that old dream has hardened considerably. There remains, unquestionably, a great deal of sympathy for the continuing human impulse to search, to question the accepted values of society which these ’60s figures represent. But that sympathy has now become leavened with some fairly stringent criticism. There are numerous references, for example, in Intertidal Life, to the soft voices adopted by the yoga-and-yogurt crowd (IL, p. 94), and the references have turned much more pointedly critical than in Rapunzel: And all those soft voices!, Alice thinks at one point, Almost like the soft voices of psychopaths, inflectionless, menacing (IL, p. 44). Beginning in the 1970s, and continuing into the present decade, Thomas has become a determined observer of the years which greatly influenced her and her entire generation. She has not, however, been an uncritically nostalgic traveller in the land of her own past.

In the fiction of the late ’70s and early ’80s, this childlike desire of some characters to return to the supposed simplicity of the love-beads generation is related, for Thomas, to a particular form of breakdown in male-female relationships. In the work written in this last decade, Thomas has been especially fascinated by the figure of the forty- or fifty-year-old male who wishes to return both to the ’60s and to his youth. For Thomas, this obsession is part of what popular psychologists have termed the Peter Pan syndrome – a childlike regression whereby the male wishes to have all the benefits of relationships with little in the way of responsibility. Multiple relationships and no-commitment arrangements become means of satisfying male vanity. In Latakia, a novel Thomas published in 1979, as well as in the story Crossing the Rubicon from the 1981 collection Real Mothers, characters contemplate a ménage à trois shared by one man and two women (never the other way around); typically, in these fictions, it is the male who desires the relationship, a younger woman who goes along with it, and the older woman who initially agrees, but then discovers its exploitive nature and leaves it.

In Thomas’s fiction of the ’80s, that act of leaving becomes an important motif. The 1986 collection of stories, Goodbye Harold, Good Luck, is named for a woman’s scrawled message on a motel bathroom mirror, left for her lover to find in the morning. Another woman, leaving her obsessively perfectionist husband, finds the message in that same motel room. The Audrey Thomas heroines who find it so difficult to let go of the past and its commitments and dreams have decided to move on.

This act of leaving can take several forms. One is the act of forming new sexual relationships, difficult though that may be after an experience of loss. In stories like Breaking the Ice from Goodbye Harold, Good Luck, and Harry and Violet and the title story from Real Mothers, women take on that challenge, facing as they do so not only their reservations about the probability of success in the everlasting power struggles between male and female, but also the implications of new ties for children of the former relationship. These new relationships are not simply dream-versions of the old flawed ones; the story Real Mothers contains a new relationship which promises to be even more nightmarish than the preceding one.

Thomas’s heroines of the ’80s find other ways of taking leave of the old attachment of male and female in conventional marriage. One is the tie between mother and daughter, a major feature of the story Crossing the Rubicon from Real Mothers and particularly in the close, sustaining relationships between Alice and her daughters in Intertidal Life.

The other comforting children which these recent Thomas heroines find are their relationships with language, the texts they write. In Out in the Midday Sun from Real Mothers, the woman who has hated her writer husband’s tendency to use her in his fiction wonders, at the end of the story, whether she, too, will take in all the details of their breakup and then, when she got free of him, write about that too? (RM, p. 100). Ironically, the letter she has which will likely bring about the end of their marriage is not a letter from a lover, as one might be led to believe, but rather a letter promising to publish her work. For Thomas, this is one of the most powerful means women have of leaving the power relationships between men and women: to take in all the details … and write about them too.

¹ Audrey Thomas, Open Letter to Dorothy Livesay, Room of One’s Own, V, 3 (1980), 71.

² Audrey Thomas, Intertidal Life (Toronto: Stoddart, 1984), p. 271. Subsequent references to this novel will appear parenthetically in the text as IL. Other abbreviations for Thomas’s works in the text are TGB for Ten Green Bottles; Songs for Songs My Mother Taught Me; LE for Ladies & Escorts; RM for Real Mothers; and MB for Mrs. Blood.

³ Elizabeth Komisar, Audrey Thomas: a review / interview, Open Utter, 3rd Series, No. 3 (Fall 1975), p. 63.

⁴ Alice Munro, What Is Real?, in John Metcalf, ed., Making It New: Contemporary-Canadian Stories (Toronto: Methuen, 1982), p. 226.

Chronology

Comments by Audrey Thomas

But I am a part of the political and economic events of my time, just as Virginia Woolf was (Mrs. Dalloway) or Jane Austen or Mrs. Humphrey Ward or Susanah [sic] Moodie or whoever. They are reflected in my work of necessity. … I do not march in marches or wave banners but I have raised / am raising three daughters and I have taught and in both instances I have tried to express openly, verbally, and by example, how I feel about the world we live in.

…

One thing that has always intrigued me is how poets can say I I I all the time and it’s called the Lyric Impulse but when prose writers do that it’s considered confessional or too autobiographical or bad form.

…

I believe the statistics show that at least one out of every ten pregnancies ends in a miscarriage. I had one – a long, drawn-out painful affair where I finally lost the child at over six months. And so I wrote, first a story, then a book, about it: Mrs. Blood. No one, to my knowledge, had written a book about something that has happened to millions of women over the years.

Open Letter to Dorothy Livesay, Room of One’s Own, V, 3 (1980), 72, 72-73, 73.

So many men have presumed to write from a woman’s point of view, from Flaubert to Brian Moore, & in some cases have done it very badly. But I’ve taken that on [i.e., writing from a man’s point of view] as a kind of challenge. Now, with Munchmeyer, his daydreams & things are not so far off anyone’s daydreams, who wants to write or whatever…. But male idiom is different, male syntax is different…. Their dreams might be the same, but they would express themselves differently.

…

But one way of bleeding without bleeding is to be a poet or a writer…. One way of dealing with the past is to write about it.

Interview with George Bowering, Open Letter,

4th series, No. 3 (Spring 1979), pp. 11, 22.

I do think writing has a moral purpose but you can’t add it like vanilla.

…

What I’m saying is women have a voice and they ought to be heard. I’m also saying, you can write your book any damn way you want to as long as it works and don’t let men tell you that it has to have the larger scene. I’m so fed up with hearing that. You know, you’ve got to write War and Peace, you’ve got to write this great diorama of history, The Naked and the Dead. You’ve got to set it in the context of the great social upheavals of your time. Well, yes or maybe not. I think that women get very scared by that because they think this is not very good writing because it doesn’t…. And I’d like to demonstrate through my literature that you can do whatever you like. If you want to have seventeen points of view, have them, if you want to chop your thing in the middle, do it. Virginia Woolf was doing that sort of thing all the time, she didn’t care. If you want to make a letter form, fine, that’s an old way, that’s the way the novel started.

…

Yes, I think everybody writes autobiography. I think everybody writes one story, has one thing that really interests them, and I suppose what really interests me is the relationship between men and women and how we lie to one another. I think one of the hardest things for women right now, because we’ve gotten so strong (and we really are strong) is that we’re very intolerant of the weakness of men.

Interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Room of One’s Own, X,3,4 (1986), 43,45-46,58.

Comments on Audrey Thomas

What it [Blown Figures] is, in fact, is a fascinating, many-faceted, beautifully sustained novel, which involves us with its central character to such an extent that we really care about her. Isobel is not yet out of the forest, literally and symbolically, when we part with her at the novel’s ending. Dealing as it does with the attempt to assimilate into a woman’s mind the virtually unbearable fact of her child’s death-in-birth, a fact which has shattered her in ways she cannot communicate because even her husband has no real comprehension of her pain, this novel conveys to me, finally, both a sense of hiatus and a sense of being stubbornly alive.

Margaret Laurence, "Blown Figures: A Review", Gazette (Montreal), April 1975 [repr.in Room of One’s Own, X, 3, 4(1986), 101-2].

As we might expect, Thomas’s women dissent from the traditional roles and domestic plots in which they find themselves implicated as mothers, wives, and lovers, and yet their resistance is always a double game where denials provoke unexpected yearnings for what they are losing/have already lost.

Coral Ann Howells, "No Sense of an Ending: Real Mothers", Room of One’s Own, X,3,4 (1986), 113.

If anything may be said to be Audrey Thomas’s consistent theme, it is private fear.

George Bowering, Snow Red: The Short Stories of Audrey Thomas, Open Letter, 3rd Series, No. 5 (Summer 1976), p. 29.

Throughout Thomas’s fictions is the constant fact of suffering, and an acute awareness of the psychological results of suffering – its power to distort our perceptions and our memories. A recurrent situation takes us to the appalling borderland between sanity and madness; on that knife edge of mental anguish appears the terror that haunts all Thomas’s fiction. Yet the essential quality of her work does not lie in the nightmare that shadows her psychologically complex characters and loosens their grasp of experience; but rather in the precarious equilibrium – which they achieve so intermittently – between the fear and the joy of existence.

George Woodcock, Audrey Thomas, in Robert Lecker and Jack David, eds., The New Canadian Anthology, (Scarborough: Nelson, 1988), p. 410.

Selected Bibliography

Works by Audrey Thomas

Short Stories

Goodbye Harold, Good Luck. Toronto: Viking, 1986.

Ladies & Escorts. Ottawa: Oberon, 1977.

Real Mothers. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1981.

Ten Green Bottles. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967; repr., Ottawa: Oberon, 1977.

Novels

Blown Figures. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1974.

Intertidal Life. Toronto: Stoddart, 1984.

Latakia. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1979.

Mrs. Blood. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970; repr. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1975.

Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

Songs My Mother Taught Me. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1973.

Essays

African Journal Entries, Capilano Review, VII (1975), 55-62.

Basmati Rice: An Essay About Words", Canadian Literature, No. 100 (1984), pp. 312-17.

‘My Craft and Sullen Art’: The Writers Speak. Is There a Feminine Voice in Literature?, Atlantis, IV, 1 (1978), 152-54.

Through a Glass Darkly: Canadian Art Criticism, Canadian Literature, No. 46 (1970), pp. 62-72.

Reviews

A Broken Wand? [review of The Diviners by Margaret Laurence], Canadian Literature, No. 62 (1974), pp. 89-91.

Closing Doors [review of The Book of Eve by Constance Beresford-Howe and Monodromos by Marian Engel], Canadian Literature, No. 61 (1975), pp. 79-81.

Extraordinary Girls and Women [review of Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro], Canadian Literature, No. 67 (1976), pp. 85-87.

Interviews

Bowering, George. Songs and Wisdom: An Interview with Audrey Thomas, Open Letter, 4th Series, No. 3 (Spring 1979), pp. 5-31.

Komisar, Elizabeth. Audrey Thomas: A Review/Interview, Open Letter, 3rd Series, No. 3 (Fall 1975), pp. 59-64.

Wachtel, Eleanor. An Interview with Audrey Thomas, Room of One’s Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 7-61.

Selected Criticism

Archer, Anne. Real Mummies, Studies in Canadian Literature, IX (1984), 214-23.

Amussen, Robert. Finding a Writer, Room of One’s Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 63-67.

Bellette, A.F. Some Observations on the Novels of Audrey Thomas, Open Letter, 3rd Series, No. 3 (1975), pp. 65-69.

Bossanne, Brigitte G. Audrey Thomas and Lewis Carroll: Two Sides of the Looking Glass, Northern Dakota Quarterly, LII, 3 (1984), 215-33.

Bowering, George. Snow Red: The Short Stories of Audrey Thomas, Open Letter, 3rd Series, No. 5 (Summer 1976), pp. 28-39.

———. Munchmeyer and the Marys, Room of One’s Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 86-98.

Butling, Pauline. Thomas and her Rag-Bag, Canadian Literature, No. 102 (1984), pp. 195-99.

———. "The Cretan Paradox or Where the Truth Lies in Latakia", Room of One’s Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 105-10.

Coldwell, Joan. Memory Organized: The Novels of Audrey Thomas, Canadian Literature, No. 92 (Spring 1982), pp. 46-56.

———. "Natural Herstory and Intertidal Life", Room of One’s Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 140-49.

Diotte, Robert. The Romance of Penelope: Audrey Thomas’s Isobel Carpenter Trilogy, Canadian Literature, No. 86 (Autumn 1980), pp. 60-68.

Gottlieb, Lois C, and Wendy Keitner. Narrative Technique and the Central Female Character in the Novels of Audrey Thomas, World Literature Written in English, XXI, (1982), 364-73.

Howells, Coral Ann. "Margaret Laurence: The Diviners and Audrey Thomas: Latakia", Canadian Woman Studies, VI, 1 (1984), 98-100.

———. "No Sense of an Ending: Real Mothers", Room of One’s Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 111-23.

Keitner, Wendy. Real Mothers Don’t Write Books: A Study of the Penelope-Calypso Motif in the Fiction of Audrey Thomas and Marian Engel, in John Moss, ed., Present Tense: A Critical Anthology. Toronto: NC Press, 1985, pp. 185-204.

MacKendrick, Louis K. "A Peopled Labyrinth of Walls: Audrey Thomas’ Blown Figures", in John Moss, ed., Present Tense: A Critical Anthology. Toronto: NC Press, 1985, pp. 168-84.

Renaud, Gaston. Translating Audrey Thomas into French,