Biographer Elspeth Cameron told stories of Canadian literary talents and revealed her own secret life

Elspeth Cameron traced the lives of Canada’s leading literary figures in her readable, thoroughly researched biographies at a time when novelists and poets were kicking over the colonial guardrails, starting to invent a distinctive national literature in the Canadian vernacular. They set out to create works of poetry and fiction that followed neither English nor American models.

She explained her motivation when she wrote the first of her hefty literary biographies, Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life (1981), which was shortlisted for a Governor-General’s award that year. University English departments at the time were committed to teaching the New Criticism, which looked at the language and construction of fiction, its formalist qualities, without reference to the lived experience of authors, or the historical period that had shaped them. She wanted her biographies to correct this arid approach