The Gloriously Ugly in Marian Engel's No Clouds of Glory (Sarah Bastard's Notebook)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses how the protagonist of Marian Engel’s first novel, No Clouds of Glory (1968) revises her roles in her past relationships to reimagine her future possibilities. The conversation in Engel’s novel, retitled Sarah Bastard’s Notebook when it was republished in 1974, reflects the author’s own anxiety about being a woman but also lends itself, almost sixty years after its first publication, to ongoing conversations about female bodies, gender identities, and sexuality. Scholarship about the novel has generally touched on nationality, gender and identity, and writing and feminism. More recent scholarship discusses the female professor trope in Canadian fiction written by women and imposter syndrome. Building on these conversations, this essay shifts attention to how romance in the novel attaches to what Engel’s protagonist experiences as “the ugly.” Engel, through her mode of critique and the novel’s irritated aesthetic, decentres beauty and patriarchal femininity as a woman’s sole measure of value. Moreover, Sarah’s abortions function as a ritual cleansing of the female-coded self, removing the sterile and potentially dangerous material of romance’s reproductive mythology from the body.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".