SOURCE: Howells, Coral Ann. “Marian Engel's Bear: Pastoral, Porn, and Myth.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 17, no. 4 (October 1986): 105-14.

In the following essay, Howells discusses Bear in the context of the Canadian wilderness myth.

Sure, they're women's books, because they're about women and written by a woman … Remember that glorious song from The Music Man, “The Sadder but Wiser Girl for Me?” That's what I call a woman—and when I get letters and phone calls from intelligent women, I don't think the term “woman's writer” is perjorative, not at all. Who's afraid of women's books?

(Marian Engel, Interview with Graeme Gibson)¹

Bear won the Governor General's Award for the best Canadian novel of 1976 and rightly so, I think, because it is quintessentially Canadian.² It is a Canadian pastoral about landscape and wilderness, about a quest, about a bear, about the relation between civilization and savage...