At the end of 1946, Grace leaves us far south (New Orleans), with Lowry notifying his New York editor Albert Erskine that he is minutes away from boarding a ship that, he thinks, might very well sink. Grace has already drawn us into Volume II with many “intratextual” references to a volume we cannot yet see, but which we feel might begin on that precarious ship. Still, Lowry’s own message will remain: “Lift up your hearts ... Sursum Corda/” paul g. tiessen / Wilfrid Laurier University Christl Verduyn, ed., Dear Marian, Dear Hugh: The MacLennan-Engel Cor respondence (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1995). vi, 134. $18.00 paper. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, Writing A Life: L.M. Montgomery (Toronto: ECW Press, 1995). 133. $14.95 paper. The personal lives of writers are always of interest to readers of their works and the above volumes both provide some gratification to the voyeur seeking intimate glimpses of three distinguished Canadian authors. The chief disap pointment in reading The MacLennan-Engel Correspondence is the discovery that it includes only five letters (written in 1976,1980, 1981, 1983 and 1984) by Engel to MacLennan rather than the two-sided correspondence the title leads one to expect. Understandably, MacLennan did not keep the letters he received from Miss Marian Passmore, the graduate student at McGill whose M.A. thesis on the novel in Canada he began directing in 1956; apart from one brief note of sympathy on the death of his first wife (39) her writing in this period is represented only in brief extracts from her thesis, written in the impersonal prose appropriate to that exercise. She, of course, kept all of her famous mentor’s missives with their lively commentary on nov els at home and abroad, his own fiction (including The Watch That Ends The Night on which he was working at this time), and the manuscripts she sent him as an aspiring writer herself from the late 50s through to 1966, when he congratulated her on the forthcoming publication of No Clouds of Glory (108). Her recollections of their professor-student relationship and of McGill in the 1950s are provided at the end of the volume in two essays written in the 1980s. Here she mentions that she had a monumental crush on him, confirming what the reader had already guessed from MacLennan’s letter to her on November 11, 1958. His letter is a model of tact, leaving her no false hope that he could return her affection but permitting her to continue the friendship without embarrassment: “Naturally I am fond of you, attracted by you, and naturally, also I feel a certain responsibility to you, for you were my 106 pupil, and I do not under-rate my mind and knowledge, and know perfectly well that for somebody like you I, at the moment, seem more interesting and unusual and even gratifying than I will ever seem after a year or two have passed.” He continues, “There is no rejection of an affection very moving to me, but rather the opposite” (87-88). One admires MacLennan too for the wit which enables him to thank God for helping him complete The Watch That Ends the Night “in spite of the fact, apparently, that he is also responsible for Diefenbaker being P.M.” (39). The volume ends with the five letters from Engel and three replies from MacLennan, his last written in November 1984, less than three months before her death from cancer. Here they are communicating as professional equals, discussing literary and personal problems, her breezy, slangy style (“Heck, the world’s always been a mess but without tv” [111]) a nice contrast to his more literary prose. One admires the spirit with which both fight to continue writing and living despite their personal woes: her divorce (“The final straw in my marriage was being ordered to make dinner for Hugh Hood” [111]), the demands of single parenthood and later the misery of terminal illness; his role as sole care-giver in his own infirm old age to his an increasingly ill second wife, largely incapacitated by accident and illness. Christl Verduyn’s footnotes are helpful without being...