24: “The Translation of the World into Words” and the Female Tradition: Margaret Atwood, “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” (1983)

For we think back through our mothers if we are women. —Virginia Woolf M argaret A twood is, by many a count , Canada's most important writer. To begin with, she is an extremely versatile, imaginative, and, in the best sense of the word, productive writer, having published twelve volumes of poetry, twelve novels, seven short-fiction collections, six volumes of literary criticism, numerous reviews and critical articles, and even a history book, children's books, and comic strips. Her fiction and to a lesser extent her poetry have been translated into more than thirty languages. Atwood won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000 for her novel The Blind Assassin and has repeatedly been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature. On an international scale, she has become the voice of Canadian literature, not only an excellent and renowned writer, but also an intellectual and social critic who reflects upon literary as well as political and social issues in a global framework, and upon Canadian literature and culture in particular. Atwood, who is also one of the most frequently interviewed contemporary writers, has thus developed into an international celebrity and a literary icon. Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939 to Margaret Dorothy and Carl Edmund Atwood. Her mother was a former school-teacher, her father a professor of entomology. A large part of her childhood was spent in the northern bush regions of Quebec (see her novel Surfacing , 1972) where her father did his research. She received private lessons from her mother and went to a regular school only when she was twelve years old, after her family had moved to Toronto (see her novel Cat's Eye , 1988). Between 1957 and 1961 she studied at the University of Toronto under Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye, whose mythopoetical approach to literature influenced the young Atwood considerably, resulting in her groundbreaking and bestselling book of literary criticism Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), which identified the motif of survival as central to Canadian literature. Survival was published by House of Anansi Press in Toronto, which Atwood had co-founded in the 1960s in her endeavors to raise the profile of Canadian literature. From 1961 to 1963 Atwood studied at Harvard University (Radcliffe College) under Perry Miller, an expert on Puritanism (see her novel The Handmaid's Tale , 1987).

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