Anne Coleman

     In 2004, Anne Coleman published I’ll Tell You a Secret: A Memory of Seven Summers. The book — an account of her friendship as a girl with the writer Hugh MacLennan — was a critical success and great favourite with book clubs. It won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction and was reviewed in the major book review pages of newspapers and magazines across the country.

     Now Coleman has given us a new memoir that covers a longer period — in fact, eight decades, a time of great change in her life and in Canadian society. In writing that is frank, engaging and poetic, Coleman begins with the story of her childhood spent between Forest Hill in Toronto and North Hatley in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. She was a peculiar combination, in the repressive 1940s and 1950s, of pre-feminist independent girl and literary dreamer.

     Her father, Charles L. Coleman, a mining engineer and consultant, was over-protective of Anne and her equally talented and attractive two sisters, afraid they would follow the tragic examples of his sister and mother in the abusive family of his youth. Which, to an extent, Anne did. With literature as her main shaping force and source of information about life — particularly the novels of the Brontës, Jane Austen and Tolstoy — Anne, after graduating from McGill University, married a romantic and exotic figure whom she had met at age seventeen. Frank was a handsome, brilliant and athletic Slovenian whose family had lost their famous Grand Hotel Toplice in Bled, northern Yugoslavia, first to the Nazis and then to the Communists. He was just the type of man-with-a-troubled-past her reading had demanded she find. They married three years later. The marriage alternated between happiness and darkness, with Frank descending into bouts of alcoholism and depression as a result of his childhood trauma at the hands of the Nazis. After a dramatic escape from the marriage with her two small children, Anne had to start over. She earned a Master’s degree in English from Bishop’s University, and then taught for five years at Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s School in Montreal and for thirty years at Cariboo College, now Thompson Rivers University, in Kamloops, BC. She recreates the contrasting worlds of her classrooms, first at an elite girls’ private school like the one she had attended herself and then at a brand-new college in the West, first located on an Indian reservation.

     Her social life was always central to her life as well. In her 1960s Quebec years in both Montreal and North Hatley, she was part of the liveliest gatherings of the era during the rise of Canadian writing, art and politics. The circle included her old friend Hugh MacLennan, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, D. G. Jones, Ralph Gustafson, Ron Sutherland and Frank Scott.

 In the 1970s and 1980s Anne’s feminist awakening spurred her to fight for women through the development of a women’s literature program at Cariboo University College, the opening of a women’s center in the city and her lecturing on the subject in the community and in neighboring towns. Her activism was a call to arms for women. And men too. The academic men who had hitherto reigned unchallenged were now in frightened opposition to her and they fought back as best they could with mockery and threats. But Anne also shows how taxing it was for her to live her feminism fully in her private life.

     She made a second marriage, and, determined not to fail a second time, stayed far too long in a situation she should never have entered. She managed this by a kind of survival-mode denial of a difficult reality and by immersing herself in her teaching, her students and her friends. Her primary solace was “Narnia,” a 160-acre property south of Kamloops with an old Quebec-style house built during the marriage, where she continued to live for several years after the marriage was over. One section of her book is titled “How Beauty Makes Things Possible,” and her descriptions there and elsewhere in the book, whether of the hills, lake and forests of North Hatley, the top-of-the-world wildness outside Kamloops or the gardens and coastal areas of Victoria, may prove to be among some of the finest in all of Canadian writing.

     Anne Coleman continues to live a full social, family and writing life in Victoria, BC. Anne has a son who is a veterinarian and rancher, a daughter who is a math specialist and writer, seven exceptionally clever grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren (and still counting.) Anne has traveled widely on four continents, returning many times to the UK where she has taken numerous courses at Christ Church (Oxford.)