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ECW Press has launched three volumes in a new Canadian Biography Series: the first is Alice Munro: A Double Life by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, the second Dorothy Livesay: Patterns in a Poetic Life by Peter Stevens, and the third Stephen Leacock: The Sage of Orillia by James Doyle. The series is directed towards the student of Canadian literature and the general reader; the challenge, given the format, is to capture a whiff of the essence of character and to yoke life and letters within eighty - odd pages.
Each biography provides a chronology which attaches dates to significant events and publications in each writer's life. The Leacock and Livesay biographies begin with dates of birth (1869 and 1909 respectively) but the Munro chronology begins, not with her birth in 1931, but with 1830 - 50 and the opening of the Ontario Huron Tract settled by a grandfather of Alice Munro, apt because Munro appropriates this territory for her short stories. Each of the biographers approaches his or her subject from a focus signalled by a subtitle. Doyle, for example, is dealing with Leacock, the public figure and his role as 'The Sage of Orillia.' Stevens is fascinated by repetitive patterns in Livesay's life and poetry; hence his approach to Livesay is identified as 'Patterns in a Poetic Life.' Ross's , argument is that Munro as a woman and a writer necessarily lives 'A Double Life,' her thesis is that there is 'a lifelong split between ordinary life and the secret life of the imagination.'
These biographies are mini social histories, spanning several generations from the Victorian world of Leacock, through the war years of Livesay's childhood, to the depression years of Munro's early life. All three biographies comment implicitly and explicitly on the changing relationship between men and women. Doyle introduces us to the male world of clubs, McGill, and lecture tours inhabited by Leacock, a British immigrant, economist, proselytizer for the Greater Britain, and not until...