SOURCE: "Writer and Subject," in Canadian Literature, No. 55, Winter, 1973, pp. 111-13.

A Canadian educator and critic who has published editions of works by Charlotte and Anne Brontë, Rosengarten served as an editor for the journal Canadian Literature from 1977 to 1986. In the following excerpt, he offers a favorable assessment of the novellas Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island.

[In Munchmeyer] Mrs. Thomas uses such devices as the diary "confession", dream sequences, and waking fantasies to convey the spiritual confusion of one Will Munchmeyer—graduate student, père de famille, and frustrated novelist. Munchmeyer's sense of failure, and his revulsion from an empty marriage, drive him away from his family, in the first instance to a diary, where he confides his loathing for his wife. He sees himself as a modern Gulliver, trapped in the land of the giants, and confronted by the sweaty pores of a merciless Glumdalclitch; but...