SOURCE: Verduyn, Christl. “Personal Papers: Putting Lives on the Line—Working with the Marian Engel Archive.” In Working in Women's Archives: Researching Women's Private Literature and Archival Documents, edited by Helen M. Buss and Marlene Kadar, pp. 91-101. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Verduyn discusses her experience studying Engel's personal archival papers and addresses questions of biographical and psychological issues related to such research.

If this is my Golden Notebook I am getting into it a bit late. Better late than never.

—Marian Engel, 14/11/74¹

Artists and thinkers, innovators of any kind, put their inner lives on the line.

—Marian Engel, 17/11/84²

Lives. I'm putting lives on paper. It's modern, and very moral.

—Marian Engel³

In an article published in November 1984—only weeks before her untimely death on 16 February 1985—Marian Engel made a “plea” to readers and critics.⁴ This plea was “to stop turning the...