\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWDIFFERENT WORLDSA Fair Shake: Autobiographical Essays byMcGill Women, ed. by Margaret Gillett &Kay Sibbald. Eden Press, $16.95.THIS IS A PUZZLING BOOK, havingvisible raison d'être or claim to academicseriousness. It is designed to commemoratethe admission of the first womenstudents in 1884; the inevitable comparisonwith M. C. Bradbrook's That InfidelPlace (1969), which celebrated the centenaryof Girton College, Cambridge,does not favour this volume. Most of thecontributors are graduates of McGill, therest present or former members of itsfaculty. Inevitably, the writers live inUpper or Lower Canada and tend, exceptperhaps for the academics, to beprominent only there. The list includessome obvious choices, such as JessieBoyd-Scriver, one of the first four womenadmitted to Medicine. Nevertheless, thereader searches the prefatory material invain for a statement of the principle ofselection that might explain some surprisingomissions or, for that matter, the inclusionof two former directors ofWomen's Athletics. Instead of any explanation,however, one finds in the introductionsuch material as the followingeffusion on the contributors :Amid the diversity, we discovered muchcommonality. Our authors shared characteristicssuch as love of reading, love oflearning, and even — unfashionable thoughit may be — love of formal schooling. Mostof them like travel, most appreciate thegreat outdoors, some are keen on sports,more than two-thirds are married and almostall of these have children, some havebeen divorced. Some careers overlappedpredictably — Gladys Bean took over fromIveagh Munro as Director of Physical Educationand Athletics for Women: othersemerged unexpectedly — Isabel Dobell didnot really plan to follow Alice Johannsenin the McGord Museum; still others intersectedin strange places — both MargaretGillett and Melek Akben spent some timenoat the Haile Selassie I University in AddisAbaba, Ethiopia, before coming to McGill;and there is at least one case of curiouscoincidence — Kay Sibbald and ElizabethRowlinson were born on the same street inEngland and both became Associate Deansof Students at McGill.The defect of this book, in comparisonwith That Infidel Place, is that it is notof interest to the general reader. A few ofthe essays are genuinely informative andinteresting, especially those of Dr. Boyd-Scriver and Dr. Swales, the EmeritusCurator of the Herbarium, for they grewup almost in a different world (bearingin mind Virginia Woolf s assertion thathuman nature changed at the end of1910). In the essays of the younger women,the 1950's graduate will find somebits of information about changes in theuniversity. However, most of the essaysare frankly self-indulgent, so that if theirauthors do not have household names,the readers wonder impatiently why thewriter thought anyone would care.Admittedly, self-indulgence is an inherentliability in the autobiographicalessay. As the editors themselves observe,a writer "is not quite comfortable abouthow much to say, how modest to be, howfrank." That is generally true of anyautobiographical essay. Usually, however,the occasion provides direction andboundaries; the publication of one'sbook, an appearance on stage, a milestonein one's career will give point to anaccompanying autobiography and dictatewhat it contains. So here, Dr. Scriverknows that readers are interested in whatit was like to be born in 1894, to enterthe university in 1911, to lean, a "partialB.Sc." student, against the door of theFaculty of Medicine until it opened toadmit four women into the second yearof the M.D. programme. Other contributorslack that certainty about what willinterest the reader.When one goes to a photographer, oneknows the purpose, one has in mind the175