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Articles

Volume 11, Number 2 (1986)

Recent Maritime Fiction: Women and Words

  • Janice Kulyk Keefer
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1986-06-06

Abstract

The very existence of Maritime women writers, let alone their emergence into prominence, is startling -- dazzling even -- given the tradition of Maritime fiction. For it is a tradition which has, to a remarkable degree, both excluded and maligned, or at least misrepresented, women in terms of their relation to the world of words -- spoken and printed. Women writers in the Maritimes have had to carry out two enormous tasks -- not only invading the predominantly masculine world of letters, but also wrestling with and countering the portrayal of their own sex as one implacably hostile to literature and literary culture. Three female Maritime writers representative of those who have accomplished these tasks are Nancy Bauer, Susan Kerslake, and Antonine Maillet.