Sullivan, Rosemary 1947-

PERSONAL:

Born August 29, 1947, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; daughter of Michael Patrick and Leanore M. Sullivan. Education: McGill University, B.A., 1968; University of Connecticut, M.A., 1969; University of Sussex, Ph.D., 1972.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, University of Toronto, 170 St. George St., Toronto, Ontario M5R 2M8, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Dijon, Dijon, France, assistant professor, 1972-73, research assistant, 1974; University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, assistant professor of English, 1974-77; University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France, assistant professor, 1973-74, research associate, 1975; University of Toronto, Erindale College, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, assistant professor, 1977-80, associate professor, 1980-91, professor of English, 1991—, Massey College associate senior fellow, 1999, Canada Research Chair in Literature, Culture and Discourse, 2001—, director, master's program in creative writing, 2003—; Connaught fellowship, 2002; Camargo Foundation Fellowship, Cassis, France, 2005. Visiting lecturer, Shastri Institute, India, 1982; lecturer at universities and academic gatherings.

MEMBER:

International P.E.N., Writers' Union of Canada, League of Canadian Poets, Authors Guild USA, fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Canada Council fellowship, 1978-79; Brascan Silver Medal, 1986; Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first poetry collection, 1986, for The Space a Name Makes; Guggenheim fellow, 1992; Governor General's Award for nonfiction, Canadian Authors' Association Literary Award for nonfiction, and University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian Biography, all 1995, and the City of Toronto Book Award, 1996, all for Shadowmaker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen; Killam fellow, 1996; Different Drummer Independent Bookseller's Award, 2006, and the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem Award in Holocaust History, 2007, both for Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille. Grants from Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council; Canada-United States-Mexico Residency Award.

WRITINGS:

Theodore Roethke: The Garden Master, University of Washington Press (Seattle, WA), 1975.

(Editor, with Robert Scholes) Elements of Fiction, Oxford University Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1982.

(Editor) Stories by Canadian Women, Oxford University Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1984.

The Space a Name Makes (poetry), Black Moss Press (Windsor, Ontario, Canada), 1986.

(Editor) More Stories by Canadian Women, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1987.

(Editor) Poetry by Canadian Women, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1989.

By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, a Life, Viking (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1991.

Blue Panic (poetry), Black Moss Press (Windsor, Ontario, Canada), 1992.

Shadowmaker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1995.

The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, HarperFlamingo (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1998.

(Editor) The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

The Bone Ladder, Black Moss Press (Windsor, Ontario, Canada), 2000.

(Editor, with Arlene Lampert) Jeni Couzyn, The Selected Poems of Jeni Couzyn, Exile Editions (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2000.

Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsession, HarperFlamingo (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2001.

Memory-Making: The Selected Essays of Rosemary Sullivan, Black Moss Press (Windsor, Ontario, Canada), 2001.

Cuba: Grace under Pressure (photographs by Malcolm David Batty, introduction by Margaret Atwood), McArthur & Co. (Toronto, Canada), 2003.

(Editor, with Mark Levene) Short Fiction: An Anthology, Oxford University Press (Don Mills, Ontario, Canada), 2003.

Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2006.

Also author of a monograph, Robertson Davies. Contributor to Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Books in Canada, Brick, Canadian Forum, Canadian Literature, Cosmopolitan, Crossing Frontiers, Descant, Globe and Mail, Malahat Review, Meanjin, Montreal Review, New Poetry, Queen's Quarterly, Quill & Quire, Saturday Night, and Toronto Life. Member of editorial board, Descant, 1982-84, and This Magazine, 1982-88.

SIDELIGHTS:

Canadian academic Rosemary Sullivan is a biographer, anthologist, poet, and nonfiction author. Her biographies center on literary figures, each offering readers a compelling story as well as Sullivan's deep insight and respect for the creative process as practiced by the individuals. Sullivan's anthologies of Canadian women's poetry and fiction have been critical successes, while her own poetry has earned her the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. In 2001, Sullivan published Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsession, a study of destructive love relationships, as well as Memory-Making: The Selected Essays of Rosemary Sullivan.

In Theodore Roethke: The Garden Master, Sullivan traces the development of American poet Roethke's work, focusing on "the metaphysical aspects," as Helen McNeil wrote in the Times Literary Supplement. In a review for World Literature Today, J.M. Morrison maintained that "Sullivan is principally concerned with psychological patterns in Roethke's life and work…. [Sullivan] supplements her psychological expertise with a thorough knowledge of the relevant poetic and mystical traditions." McNeil noted that Sullivan "gives wise and sensitive readings of many of [Roethke's] poems," while Walter Waring, writing for the Library Journal, found that although Sullivan's "style and method are scholarly, she writes with sensitivity and perception."

Sullivan turns her attention to Canadian expatriate novelist Elizabeth Smart in her study By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, a Life. Smart, who had four children with the married English poet George Barker, is best known for the autobiographical novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. After the novel's appearance in 1945, Smart published no new work for some thirty years, working instead as an advertising copywriter and magazine editor during this time. Sullivan explained in her study that she wanted to write "a feminist biography," but Elspeth Cameron in Canadian Forum believed that "Smart's life is not well suited to what Sullivan wants to demonstrate." Cameron argued that Smart "was infantile and self-centred all her life, hardly the free and independent spirit Sullivan wants us to admire." Although Sherrill Grace in Canadian Literature admitted that Sullivan's biography did not "encourage [her] to re-read Smart's published work," she did find it "an interesting biography written with sensitivity and care." Writing for Contemporary Review, Geoffrey Heptonstall concluded that By Heart is a "sympathetic and compelling book" and a "true story of what a woman's patience can endure, and of what her resolution can achieve."

In Shadowmaker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen Sullivan focuses on a Canadian poet whose work earned her a Governor General's Award and whose alcoholism led to her death at age forty-six. Sullivan's biography uncovers the secret side of MacEwen who, although a lifelong writer, left behind no personal letters or diaries. Reviewing the biography for Maclean's, John Bemrose noted that Shadowmaker possesses "an incisive, empathetic immediacy that raises it above the cumbersome, overly detailed work of so many biographers. And while it reveals a great deal about MacEwen, it never presumes to explain everything."

Sullivan's anthologies, Stories by Canadian Women and More Stories by Canadian Women, gather together examples of the best short fiction written by Canadian women from the country's earliest settlement to the present day. As Cathy Matyas, reviewing the first anthology, noted in Essays on Canadian Writing: "The main criterion for Sullivan really did seem to be quality, and the result is an admirably cohesive anthology of short fiction." Speaking of More Stories by Canadian Women, which focuses on the work of contemporary writers, W.H. New, reviewing for Books in Canada, praised its inclusion of "alternative traditions in Canadian writing" and found that, "as with Sullivan's earlier volume, this is a book to absorb rather than to rush through."

Following the success of these collections, Sullivan edited Poetry by Canadian Women, a representative collection of the best poetry written by Canadian women. Joe Rosenblatt, writing for Books in Canada, explained that, "having culled a century and a half from the corpus of Canadian Women's poetry, Sullivan places these gems under a variant roof with a historical and evolutionary nexus to hold the poetical works together." "Flipping through the pages, through the centuries, is an entertaining, enlightening, and (inevitably for many women) affirming experience," claimed Louise McKinney in Quill & Quire.

Sullivan's own poetry has appeared in such collections as The Space a Name Makes and Blue Panic. Sullivan's poems are often concerned with how larger social processes shape our lives. The poems in Blue Panic, as Canadian Literature reviewer Sue Schenk stated, tell of the "human desire to locate a narrative thread that would allow us to make sense of our lives." Sullivan's poems are "lean and vigorous, with the colloquial directness of a documentary film," wrote Barbara Carey in Books in Canada. The Space a Name Makes was honored with a Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first poetry collection.

In Sullivan's 2001 work, Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsession, the author mixes fictional stories with nonfictional commentary in explaining how the belief in romantic love can cause women to initiate and tolerate undesirable relationships. "The experience of reading Sullivan's words," noted Elsa Gaztambide in Booklist, "is very much like holding a mirror up to your soul." Shana C. Fair, writing for the Library Journal, praised Sullivan's "conversational style, which creates intimacy between reader and writer." "As long as human beings have complex needs and hungry libidos," January Magazine reviewer Margaret Gunning stated, "dangerous passion will always happen…. But the book does offer some valuable insight to the many women who have survived to tell the tale."

Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille tells a dual story, offering readers a glimpse of both the actual Villa Air-Bel, a nineteenth-century house in Marseille, France, that served as a refuge for various artists and intellectuals attempting to leave the country during World War II, and also of the people of France and their reactions to Nazi occupation following the fall of Paris in June 1940. Sullivan attempts to capture the panic, the anger, and the sense of helplessness, as well as the struggles to leave France legally or illegally. Sullivan writes about both the more famous individuals who found themselves in Marseille at the time, such as Max Ernst and André Breton, and average men as well. Although the subject is intriguing, several reviewers agreed that Sullivan's tendency to overwrite served to lessen the suspense and emotional impact of her tale. David Laskin, writing for the Seattle Times, noted that "before she gets to Marseille, Sullivan gives us 100 odd pages of historical background, from the rise of fascism to the Spanish Civil War to the folly and blindness that led to the fall of France." However, Andrew Kett, in a review for Quill & Quire, remarked: "Sullivan has written a book of great detail and complexity, though one that is full of darkness."

Sullivan once told CA: "I lived four years in England, two in France, and have traveled widely. My Canadian background—the complexity of living in two cultures, French and English, both of which are in a process of profound cultural change—is at the root of my particular view of the world."

She later added: "Books were always a part of my childhood, but we had few books at home. I carted them back from libraries and read them under the bed covers with a flashlight late into the night—a secret, obsessive ritual. It wasn't that I feared being caught reading. It was simply that I couldn't stop until I reached the end of the story. I was an addict. And I fell for the texture of words. I compiled lists of words that I memorized. In high school, I wrote for the student newspaper—columns that were absurdly stilted because of the polysyllables that propped them up.

"I wanted to go to university, but when I was awarded a Rotary Club scholarship, my father was angry. He said university would be wasted on a girl and that I should get a job to help support the family. Bitter fights between us rocked the whole household, but I would not be deterred.

"When I read Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in my first-year literature class, it was like reading my own autobiography, so repressive had been the particular brand of Jansenist Irish Catholicism in which I had grown up. And so I dreamed of being a writer, forging in the smithy of my soul and so forth. Only slowly did I discover that Joyce didn't believe women could be artists. It was one thing to take on my father, but to enter the exclusive world of male writers, that demanded what seemed an impossible courage.

"But then I met two women writers who became my close friends. Jeni Couzyn, a South African poet, read my poems and told me to keep writing. And P.K. Page, a wonderful Canadian poet, published one of my first poems in her anthology To Say the Least. They became my mentors, that indispensable advocate who helps one to negotiate the quicksand of self-doubt that always threatens to overwhelm a young writer.

"Any writer will tell you that the real payoff is the writing itself, when you are inside the universe of a book, feeding the obsession. That is true, but then there is the deep pleasure of discovering you have a readership. People approach you tentatively to tell you how your book moved or helped or changed them. Of course you write to be read, but it always comes as a shock to realize that long after you have left a book behind, a dialogue still continues in its pages between you and [the] readers, strangers you will never meet."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 1, 2001, Elsa Gaztambide, review of Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsession, p. 625.

Books in Canada, October, 1987, W.H. New, review of More Stories by Canadian Women, pp. 31-32; May, 1989, Joe Rosenblatt, review of Poetry by Canadian Women, p. 36; March, 1992, Barbara Carey, review of Blue Panic, p. 53.

Canadian Book Review Annual, Volume 65, 1998, review of The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, p. 85.

Canadian Forum, August, 1991, Elsbeth Cameron, review of By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, a Life, pp. 26-28.

Canadian Literature, summer, 1992, Sherrill Grace, review of By Heart, pp. 146-149; autumn, 1992, Sue Schenk, review of Blue Panic, pp. 169-170; spring, 1997, review of Shadowmaker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen, p. 244.

Contemporary Review, April, 1993, Geoffrey Heptonstall, review of By Heart, pp. 217-218.

Essays on Canadian Writing, fall, 1986, Cathy Matyas, review of Stories by Canadian Women, pp. 140-143.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), September 18, 1999, review of The Red Shoes, p. D19; October 30, 1999, review of The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English, p. D10.

Library Journal, May 1, 1976, Walter Waring, review of Theodore Roethke: The Garden Master, p. 1123; October 15, 2001, Shana C. Fair, review of Labyrinth of Desire, pp. 95-96.

Maclean's, October 2, 1995, John Bemrose, review of Shadowmaker, p. 62.

Quill & Quire, June, 1989, Louise McKinney, review of Poetry by Canadian Women, p. 40; September, 1998, review of The Red Shoes, p. 58; November, 1999, review of The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English, p. 35.

Times Literary Supplement, January 27, 1978, Helen McNeil, review of Theodore Roethke, p. 79.

World Literature Today, spring, 1977, J.M. Morrison, review of Theodore Roethke, p. 285; summer, 1999, review of The Red Shoes, p. 538.

ONLINE

Banff Centre,http://www.banffcentre.ab.ca/ (June 1, 2001), "Rosemary Sullivan."

January Magazine,http://www.januarymagazine.com/ (June 1, 2001), Margaret Gunning, "Cul-de-Sac of Passion."

Quill & Quire Online,http://www.quillandquire.com/ (June 9, 2007), Andrew Kett, review of Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille.

Seattle Times Online,http://www.seattletimes.nwsource.com/ (October 6, 2006), David Laskin, review of Villa Air-Bel.