BIOGRAPHY

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939. Her parents were Carl Atwood, a professor of zoology and forester, and Margaret Killam, a nutritionist.

During World War II, Carl Atwood was employed as a forester by the federal government. The Atwoods spent most of the war years living in a tent at his research station in the wilds of northern Quebec. Dr. and Mrs. Atwood taught their children a love of nature and of literature�the main (and only) past-times possible in such isolation. In the winters, the Atwoods lived a more conventional life in Ottawa, where the children attended school for only a few months of the year. Says Atwood, �I did not attend a full year of school until I was in grade eight. This was a definite advantage.�

By 1951, when the youngest Atwood, Ruth, was born, the family had more or less settled down in Toronto. There Atwood remained until finishing high school.

Atwood showed signs of her future career from a young age. Her interest in writing sprang from an early and enduring love of reading. She and her brother spent their time in the bush reading everything from favourite comic books to a thousand-page volume of Grimm�s fairy tales. By high school she was indiscriminately devouring anything she could get her hands on, from the classics of English literature to trashy pocketbook mysteries.

Having been making up stories and plays from the time she could wield a pen, her interest in writing was temporarily diverted when she entered public school full-time. Both she and her older brother, Harold, were excellent science students and seemed destined to follow in their parents� footsteps. However, in her senior year of high school, as Atwood describes it, she suddenly became a poet:

The day I became a poet was a sunny day of no particular ominousness. I was walking across the football field [�] because this was my normal way home from school. I was scuttling along in my usual furtive way, suspecting no ill, when a large invisible thumb descended from the sky and pressed down on the top of my head. A poem formed. It was quite a gloomy poem; the poems of the young usually are. It was a gift, this poem � a gift from an anonymous donor, and, as such, both exciting and sinister at the same time.

By the time she graduated, her ambition was well-established. Her high school yearbook write-up claimed that �Peggy�s not-so-secret ambition is to write THE Canadian novel � and with those marks in English, who doubts that she will?�

With this goal in mind, she enrolled at the University of Toronto�s Victoria College in 1957, and graduated with a BA in honours English four years later. Victoria was a relatively liberal school that, unusually for the time, had many female faculty members. There, Atwood had what was apparently a very positive undergraduate experience, both on- and off-campus. She became involved with the college�s literary journal and gave her first poetry reading, at the aptly named Bohemian Embassy in Toronto. Here she met other emerging poets of the time, and became unfortunately familiar with the unsubtle gender bias in literary circles at the time. She self-published several small chapbooks of her own poetry, including Double Persephone.

In 1961, after graduating, she moved to Boston for further studies. She earned an MA from Radcliffe in 1962, and then went on to Harvard to begin work on a doctoral degree. Her time in the United States opened Atwood�s eyes to just how difficult a time she was going to have trying to make it, not only as a Canadian writer, but as a woman in a man�s world. At the time, for example, one of Harvard�s main literature libraries was not accessible by �studentesses.� Atwood claims that telling fellow students she planned on becoming a �woman writer� was �like saying you were going to pee in the men�s washroom: either daring or in bad taste." Nevertheless, she continued to write poetry prolifically, experimenting with the very forms she was studying at school. Her often alienating experiences at Harvard contributed to her later passion for both the Canadian nationalist and feminist causes.

Having returned to Toronto in 1963 with her PhD thesis still incomplete, Atwood worked briefly at a variety of jobs, traveled for a time in Europe, and then landed her first teaching position at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In 1966, after she had returned to Harvard to take another stab at finishing her PhD, her first book of poetry, The Circle Game, was published by a small press. Awarded the Governor-General�s Literary Award the following year, it launched Atwood's critical acclaim, and permanently derailed her thesis. She married Jim Polk, whom she had known since her first years at Harvard, and throughout the rest of the 1960s, they lived and taught together in Edmonton, Montreal, and England.

McClelland & Stewart finally published her first novel, The Edible Woman, which had been written four years previously, in 1969. Surfacing followed shortly.

In 1972 Atwood and Polk ended their relationship, and not long afterward she fell in love with Toronto novelist Graeme Gibson. They bought a farm together in rural Alliston, outside of Ontario, where they lived for the remainder of the 1970s. During this period her first book of criticism, Survival, came out. Two more novels, Lady Oracle and Life Before Man, were written and released, along with another half-dozen volumes of poetry. She saw her fair share of criticism and controversy during this period, including mean-spirited parodies and thinly veiled sexism from the Canadian literary world. In 1976 Atwood donned another hat-- that of mother-- when her daughter Jess was born.

The 1980s, which she spent in Toronto, Europe, Alabama, New York, and Australia, saw the indefatigable Atwood continue in the same vein. In 1981 she was awarded the Order of Canada and became increasingly involved in environmental and humanitarian causes. A collection of critical prose, Second Works, was released, as were several more volumes of poetry and a novel, Bodily Harm. Atwood cemented her international presence with 1985�s The Handmaid�s Tale, which won her another Governor-General�s award and was nominated for the Booker Prize. This was followed in 1988 by Cat�s Eye.

The 1990s included two more novels, The Robber Bride and Alias Grace, two volumes of short fiction, several retrospective poetry collections, children�s books, anthologies, and another critical work, Strange Things. She remained an active participant in both humanitarian causes like PEN Canada, and in the larger literary community, continuing to pen reviews and other freelance work for newspapers and magazines.

Since the turn of the millennium, she has released two more novels, The Blind Assassin and the dystopian Oryx & Crake, children�s books and nonfiction, and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.

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Atwood is notable not only for her own achievements in writing, but for her contribution to and participation in the 20th century�s emerging Canadian literature scene. In an essay about her early literary aspirations, she writes:

[T]he prospects of being a Canadian and a writer, both at the same time, in 1960, were dim. [�] Canadian writers, it was assumed�by my professors, my contemporaries, and myself�were a freak of nature, like duck-billed platypuses. Logically they ought not to exist, and when they did so anyway, they were just pathetic imitations of the real thing. [�] for those few who managed [�] to struggle into print (five novels in English in 1960) [�] a thousand [copies] made a novel a Canadian best seller. (Atwood, xiii)

Atwood can be considered a groundbreaker not only as a Canadian novelist, but also as a female novelist. To give you an idea of the era in which Atwood began her writing career, she tells the story of one of her friend�s mothers saying of her chosen career, �Well, that�s nice dear, because you can do it at home, can�t you?� (Atwood, xiv). She recalls looking back at the fates of all the successful women writers she had read and deciding that her choices were between �excellence and doom on the one hand, and mediocrity and cosiness on the other� (Atwood, xiv). She was further discouraged by the prevalent stereotype of a woman�s role in the creation of art�as inspiration or muse rather than as creator. Atwood�s own experiences as a woman have clearly informed her writing. Nathalie Cooke writes:

[One] issue that emerges throughout Atwood�s fiction involves the various roles society expects women to play and the ways in which women respond to these roles. All of Atwood�s female characters are acutely aware of social expectations. They are concerned about them, unable to ignore them. Not all of these women comply, though, and it is through their refusal to play along that we come to learn about them and, in some ways, to judge them. What Atwood�s fiction suggests is that external expectations play a large part in women�s identity construction. (Cooke, 324-5)

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