Constance Beresford-Howe is a successful popular writer who has also achieved critical acclaim by portraying the realistic lives of contemporary women in their struggle for freedom against popular expectations--both sexist and feminist. Constance Elizabeth Beresford-Howe was born in Montreal, the only daughter of Russell and Marjory Mary Moore Beresford-Howe. Her father was an insurance salesman, her mother a housewife and aspiring author. She grew up in Notre Dame de Grace during the Depression, living with her parents and brother in a succession of low-rent flats. An attack of rheumatic fever at age eleven, which confined her to bed for months, strengthened her inclination to introspection, reading, and writing, and by the time she was fourteen she was planning an epic novel about Napoleon. Encouraged by her English teachers at West Hill High School, she entered the second year of the Honours English course at McGill University in 1942 (on...