Elizabeth Waterston

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Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, emeritus professor of English at the University of Guelph, was awarded the Order of Ontario in 2011 for “lifetime contributions to Canadian literature and culture.” She is a Fellow of the Royal Society Canada. She says:

After years of publishing academic books and articles and editing learned journals, I have happily swung into writing novels and memoirs. My novels now include a historical romance (Plaid around the Mountain), a local colour novel (At the Corner of Hope) and a late-life love-story (Passion Spent). I write the kind of books I like to read: colorful, warm-hearted, full of convincing characters and unexpected plot twists.

My latest book however is a memoir about college life in wartime. I enrolled at McGill University the week World War II began. On campus we enjoyed torchlight football parades and dances at the Ritz Carleton hotel while absorbing news of U-boats torpedoing convoys and war planes plummeting into the British channel. Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs draws on my memories of those days. In my earlier book Rapt in Plaid: Canadian Literature and Scottish Tradition, memoir merges with literary criticism, exploring connections between Munro and Laurence, for instance, with Carlyle and Galt.

Kindling Spirit, my little book on L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, led to a series of articles on the way other authors’ lives and works interact, climaxing in the full-length study Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery. Here each of Montgomery’s twenty-two novels is set into the context of her life, times, markets, and aspirations.

With my friend and colleague Mary Rubio I have co-edited five volumes of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, and produced popular editions of seven of Montgomery’ novels, and prepared Anne of Green Gables: A Norton Critical Edition for use in college courses on Women’s Studies and Children’s Literature. The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery, The PEI Years, 1889-1900 was released in 2012.

Elizabeth Waterston             

To contact Elizabeth Waterston by email, write to: waterston.elizabeth@gmail.com             

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