Canada and Beyond 3.1-2 (2013): 289 Giving the Twenty-First Century a Try: Canadian and Québécois Women Writers as Essayists Christl Verduyn Mount Allison University This essay applies the exploration and discussion of twenty-first-century women’s writing in Canada and Quebec to the essay genre itself. 1 A form of writing that traces its origins back to Michel de Montaigne’s 1580 Essais and Sir Francis Bacon’s 1597 Essays, 2 this genre’s place in Canadian and Québécois literary history includes a long and impressive practice by women writers, but a practice that is not well known. 3 The focus here is on essay writing by Canadian 1 I use the word essay—essai in French—but other terms are in currency for this body of writing, such as “creative non-fiction.” In French, the word “essai” can apply to a quite a long, book-length text. In English, it more typically refers to shorter pieces and the term “creative non-fiction” or “literary non-fiction” is used for the longer, book- length essay in English. In her 2002 collection Going Some Place: Creative non-fiction across Canada, Lynne van Luven includes under the rubric creative non-fiction “poetic personal journals, meditations, memoirs, activist personal reportage, autobiography, personal essays on being an outsider, historical and literary travelogues, tributes to a particular person, celebrations of a distinctive place, and explorations of the past” (ii). In a discussion about the annual Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, National Post contributor Merrily Weisbord describes literary non-fiction as “mixed genre” writing—biography, memoir, travel, adventure, sociology, sexology, anthropology—a mix that she admires for its colourful idiosyncrasy. Perspectives such as these suggest a very broad and varied contemporary understanding of non-fiction or essay writing practices. For some, they may seem too wide, but even a brief consideration of the history and development of the essay reveals that it is actually a much more flexible genre than its common association with the academic exercise would suggest. 2 The essay has twin origins and adherents—one stemming from a personal and informal French tradition tracing back to Michel de Montaigne’s 1580 Essais, the other from a more formal and empiricist English tradition, associated with Sir Francis Bacon’s 1597 Essay. Montaigne introduced the genre in 1580 with the publication of a collection of writings, Essais, in which he “tried” (essayait) to express his thoughts and feelings on a variety of different subjects. As practised by Montaigne, the essay offered a more free-form presentation that allowed unconventional connections of facts and speculation and liberation from a linear format and argumentation. Meanwhile, short years later, England’s Sir Francis Bacon introduced a very different kind of essay. Rather than the personal, Bacon focused on the observable and factual. His essays comprised empirical observations that described with ostensibly scientific accuracy the world around him. They offered advice and guidance to readers in a utilitarian, public and purposeful way. “Bacon’s essays were meant to reach a public audience that would act on his word,” essay scholar Cristina Kirklighter observes; “[Their] didactic nature […] moves away from the inconclusive skepticism that pervades Montaigne’s form” (10). Where the French style of essay could be characterized as personal, intimate, informal or conversational, the English essay could be characterized as impersonal, objective, methodical, rational, and pedagogic. See Verduyn 2007, 2012. 3 One might well be surprised by the extent of essay writing by Canadian and Québécois women novelists and poets. The literary history of this country boasts a rich and lengthy tradition of their practice of the essay genre. Margaret Laurence, Adele Wiseman, Jane Rule, Margaret Atwood, Michele Lalonde, Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Madeleine Gagnon, Dionne Brand, and Lee Maracle are just a few writers on a list that could go back as far as Pauline Johnson, Edith Eaton (aka Sui Sin Far), Emily Carr, Nellie McClung, and that includes women not only from