Kindle Price:	CDN$ 11.99
	includes free international wireless delivery via *Amazon Whispernet*
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishers CA This price was set by the publisher.

The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out by [Rosemary Sullivan]

Follow the Author

Rosemary Sullivan

The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out Kindle Edition

by Rosemary Sullivan (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

8 ratings

See all formats and editions

Amazon Price

New from

Used from

Kindle Edition

"Please retry"

$11.99

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$67.85

$66.30

$14.99

Paperback

"Please retry"

$21.95

$9.99

Kindle Edition
$11.99 Read with Our Free App
Hardcover
$67.85

14 Used from $14.99 5 New from $66.30
Paperback
$21.95

6 Used from $9.99 1 New from $21.95

International award-winning and best-selling author, Canadian cultural icon, feminist role model, "man-hater," wife, mother, private citizen and household name -- who is Margaret Atwood? Rosemary Sullivan, award-winning literary biographer, has penned The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, the first portrait of Canada's most famous novelist, focusing on her childhood and formative years as a writer and the generation she grew up in.

When Margaret Atwood was a little girl in 1949, she saw a movie called The Red Shoes. It is the story of a beautiful young woman who becomes a famous ballerina, but commits suicide when she cannot satisfy one man, who wants her to devote her entire life to her art, and another who loves her, but subjugates her to become his muse and inspiration. She struggles to choose art, but the choice eventually destroys her.

Margaret Atwood remembers being devastated by this movie but unlike many young girls of her time, she escaped its underlying message. Always sustained by a strong sense of self, Atwood would achieve a meteoric literary career. Yet a nurturing sense of self-confidence is just one fascinating side of our most famous literary figure, as examined in Rosemary Sullivan's latest biography. The Red Shoes is not a simple biography but a portrait of a complex, intriguing woman and her generation.

The seventies in Canada was the decade of fierce nationalist debate, a period during which Canada's social imagination was creating a new tradition. Suddenly everyone, from Robertson Davies to Margaret Laurence was talking, and writing, about a Canadian cultural identity. Margaret Atwood was no exception.

For despite her tremendous success that transcends the literary community, catapulting into the realm of a "household name," Margaret Atwood has remained very much a private person with a public persona.

Rosemary Sullivan reveals the discrepancy between Atwood's cool, acerbic, public image and the down-to-earth, straight-dealing and generous woman who actually writes the books. Throughout, she weaves the issues of female creativity, authority and autonomy set against the backdrop of a generation of women coming of age during one of the most radically shifting times in contemporary history.

Print length

359 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date

July 3 2012
File size

4370 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
See all details

Product description

From the Back Cover

From the author of the Governor General´s Award winner Shadow Maker and the Hilary Weston Writers´ Trust Prize winner Stalin´s Daughter

More than thirty years after the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, internationally acclaimed and bestselling author, continues to be a household name. Now, the TV adaptation of the novel has turned her handmaids into symbols around the globe. But who is Margaret Atwood? Rosemary Sullivan, award-winning biographer and poet, has penned the first portrait of Canada’s most famous novelist, a woman who helped to shatter the paradigm of the artist as exclusively male.

In Margaret Atwood: Starting Out, Rosemary Sullivan explores the trajectory of a remarkable writer’s career. She focuses on Atwood’s formative years through to the late 1970s, when the central elements of Atwood’s life—the publication of Surfacing, Power Politics, and The Edible Woman; her relationship with writer Graeme Gibson; the birth of her daughter; and her focus on Canadian culture—are set in place. A stunning blend of narrative and meditation, of discovery and insight, Margaret Atwood: Starting Out is a groundbreaking biography of one of Canada’s most provocative and visionary writers. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Rosemary Sullivan has written poetry, short fiction, biography, literary criticism, reviews, and articles. Her recent books include the critically acclaimed Villa Air-Bel and Labyrinth of Desire. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and has been awarded Guggenheim, Camargo, and Trudeau Fellowships. She is a recipient of the Lorne Pierce Medal, awarded by the Royal Society of Canada for her contribution to literature and culture, and is an Officer of the Order of Canada.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B008CH1XQ8
Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins Publishers (July 3 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4370 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 359 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #981,339 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,431 in Author Biographies (Kindle Store)
- #7,505 in Author Biographies (Books)

Customer Reviews:
8 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Rosemary Sullivan

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Rosemary Sullivan
90
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.99

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5

8 global ratings

5 star		90%
4 star 0% (0%)		0%
3 star 0% (0%)		0%
2 star		10%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from Canada

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Susan Zuckerman

Delightful analysis of the life and times of a young Atwood

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 24, 1999

This intriguing book tells about the early life of Margaret Atwood in great detail, and then skims through the last couple of decades. Rosemary Sullivan has done a remarkable job of recreating the '40's, '50's, '60's and '70's, and how they influenced (and eventually were influenced by!) Canada's #1 writer. Having interviewed Atwood, many of her friends and associates, ex-husband and present husband, and also using contemporary correspondence, Sullivan seems to have an authentic understanding of how Atwood developed into such an amazing, prolific writer. Always respectful, Sullivan keeps her focus on what in Atwood's life is relevant to her as a writer. This is a very intelligently written biography, with an incredible amount of research and very astute analyses, and should be a satisfying read for any fan of Margaret Atwood's, without feeling like you have invaded her privacy.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

E.M. Robb

Trivial factual errors raise suspicion of substance

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 25, 2003

This biography is wholly interesting, particularly in its account of the early days of the Anansi Press and the activities of such people as Dennis Lee, Michael Ondaatje, Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood herself in creating a new hospitable environment for Canadian writing. But its lapses are considerable and it betrays the signs of haste and of deficient editing. The "red shoes" conceit - an extensively belaboured allusion to the 1940s Moira Shearer movie about a ballerina who discovers that in that era it was not possible to be both an artist and a wife -- might have been marginally insightful as a passing reference. But as the title of the book and as a recurrent image it is after a time irritating in its inappropriateness to Margaret Atwood's life. The biography itself (albeit that Ms Sullivan protests that it is a "not biography") extensively demonstrates what Atwood herself has frequently noted: that the knowledge of the Northern bush which frequently enters her fiction, the practicality and down-to-earth matter-of-factness of both her prose and the persona she presents in interviews and public appearances are grounded in a childhood wholly different from conventional 1940s little-girldom.
Moreover, the text is replete with relatively trivial factual errors which after a time become disturbing, for they raise the suspicion that Ms Sullivan is not to be trusted as to matters of real significance. In particular one notes that the lapses mostly have to do with matters of common knowledge to the ordinarily literate Canadian: what knowledge of Canadian circumstances, then, does Ms Sullivan bring to the task, and given the preoccupations of her subject Margaret Atwood, was Ms Sullivan the most appropriate author to undertake it?
And given that she did undertake it, surely more knowledgeable editors can be found in the Canadian publishing industry who could catch such lapses as these examples (pagination referring to the HarperCollins paperback edition of 1998):
Page 89 "[Northrop Frye]" had the look of the lay United Church preacher he moonlighted as on weekends." But it is well known that Frye was not a "lay preacher" but an ordained clergyman in the old, though unusual in Canada, tradition of clerical dons. Given that Ms Sullivan is a professor of English at the same university as Frye this lapse is especially puzzling.
Page 177 "Ordinary women were boring, shackled in domestic virtue as the 'Angel in the House.' (Margaret had picked up Virginia Woolf's phrase long before it gained common currency.")" But it is not Virginia Woolf's phrase; it is Coventry Patmore's, though Virginia Woolf was possibly the first to identify the virtue in the Victorian poem as suspect.
Page 183-4 "Directly across the street was a brick wall....This would become the wall where the executions occurred in The Handmaid's Tale." Well, we've already been told this; one would have thought that either one of the statements of this fact should have been deleted or that some acknowledgement of the repetition ("as has been noted," say) have been made so as to allay the reader's feeling that (to be kind) Ms Sullivan's proofreaders were lying down on the job.
Page 182 "Its steps were flanked by white pseudo-Corinthian columns,...." This seems an odd qualification: surely either they were Corinthian columns or they were not: the suggestion of faded ersatz elegance is not bolstered by the word "pseudo" and Corinthian columns are not only to be found on actual classical ruins.
Page 188 "Mr Atwood was floored by the ceremony...." - but elsewhere in the text Margaret Atwood's father is referred to as "Dr Atwood," and the inconsistency, while hardly a major flaw, is mildly irritating and adds to one's impression of general sloppiness of execution.
Page 204 "[John Glassco] had not yet published his famous fictional autobiography, Memoirs of Montparnasse." Well, was it fictional? There was nothing in the reviews at the time of its publication to indicate that it was fabricated; if subsequent literary discussion has revealed otherwise then surely Ms Sullivan should have provided at least a footnote to this effect.
Page 234 "Charlie had gotten a job teaching at the University of Calgary the previous fall," ie, presumably, in 1968, when there was no University of Calgary, but rather a University of Alberta, Calgary campus.
Page 242 Margaret Laurence, from Manitoba, and Jim Polk, Atwood's first husband, "could talk about the small Midwestern towns they had come from" -- but he was from Montana and that is most certainly not the "Midwest," at least not in US terminology, though arguably Manitoba is.
Page 212 "The FLQ ...[i]n 1963 had placed their first bombs in mail boxes and public buildings." Well no, the FLQ did not exist in 1963; it was the RIN.
Page 274 The people of Mulmur Township "still spoke in an Irish/English idiom that had survived from the nineteenth century....When they referred to slightly demented people they used the expression 'two bricks short of a load""-as though this cliché were not well known outside rustic Ontario, and indeed common throughout the English-speaking world, though possibly not so well known among University of Toronto academics.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

E.M. Robb

Factual errors raise suspicion of unreliability

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 20, 2003

This biography is wholly interesting, particularly in its account of the early days of the Anansi Press and the activities of such people as Dennis Lee, Michael Ondaatje, Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood herself in creating a new hospitable environment for Canadian writing. But its lapses are considerable and it betrays the signs of haste and of deficient editing. The "red shoes" conceit - an extensively belaboured allusion to the 1940s Moira Shearer movie about a ballerina who discovers that in that era it was not possible to be both an artist and a wife -- might have been marginally insightful as a passing reference. But as the title of the book and as a recurrent image it is after a time irritating in its inappropriateness to Margaret Atwood's life. The biography itself (albeit that Ms Sullivan protests that it is a "not biography") extensively demonstrates what Atwood herself has frequently noted: that the knowledge of the Northern bush which frequently enters her fiction, the practicality and down-to-earth matter-of-factness of both her prose and the persona she presents in interviews and public appearances are grounded in a childhood wholly different from conventional 1940s little-girldom.
Moreover, the text is replete with relatively trivial factual errors which after a time become disturbing, for they raise the suspicion that Ms Sullivan is not to be trusted as to matters of real significance. In particular one notes that the lapses mostly have to do with matters of common knowledge to the ordinarily literate Canadian: what knowledge of Canadian circumstances, then, does Ms Sullivan bring to the task, and given the preoccupations of her subject Margaret Atwood, was Ms Sullivan the most appropriate author to undertake it?
And given that she did undertake it, surely more knowledgeable editors can be found in the Canadian publishing industry who could catch such lapses as these examples (pagination referring to the HarperCollins paperback edition of 1998):
Page 89 "[Northrop Frye]" had the look of the lay United Church preacher he moonlighted as on weekends." But it is well known that Frye was not a "lay preacher" but an ordained clergyman in the old, though unusual in Canada, tradition of clerical dons. Given that Ms Sullivan is a professor of English at the same university as Frye this lapse is especially puzzling.
Page 177 "Ordinary women were boring, shackled in domestic virtue as the 'Angel in the House.' (Margaret had picked up Virginia Woolf's phrase long before it gained common currency.")" But it is not Virginia Woolf's phrase; it is Coventry Patmore's, though Virginia Woolf was possibly the first to identify the virtue in the Victorian poem as suspect.
Page 183-4 "Directly across the street was a brick wall....This would become the wall where the executions occurred in The Handmaid's Tale." Well, we've already been told this; one would have thought that either one of the statements of this fact should have been deleted or that some acknowledgement of the repetition ("as has been noted," say) have been made so as to allay the reader's feeling that (to be kind) Ms Sullivan's proofreaders were lying down on the job.
Page 182 "Its steps were flanked by white pseudo-Corinthian columns,...." This seems an odd qualification: surely either they were Corinthian columns or they were not: the suggestion of faded ersatz elegance is not bolstered by the word "pseudo" and Corinthian columns are not only to be found on actual classical ruins.
Page 188 "Mr Atwood was floored by the ceremony...." - but elsewhere in the text Margaret Atwood's father is referred to as "Dr Atwood," and the inconsistency, while hardly a major flaw, is mildly irritating and adds to one's impression of general sloppiness of execution.
Page 204 "[John Glassco] had not yet published his famous fictional autobiography, Memoirs of Montparnasse." Well, was it fictional? There was nothing in the reviews at the time of its publication to indicate that it was fabricated; if subsequent literary discussion has revealed otherwise then surely Ms Sullivan should have provided at least a footnote to this effect.
Page 234 "Charlie had gotten a job teaching at the University of Calgary the previous fall," ie, presumably, in 1968, when there was no University of Calgary, but rather a University of Alberta, Calgary campus.
Page 242 Margaret Laurence, from Manitoba, and Jim Polk, Atwood's first husband, "could talk about the small Midwestern towns they had come from" -- but he was from Montana and that is most certainly not the "Midwest," at least not in US terminology, though arguably Manitoba is.
Page 212 "The FLQ ...[i]n 1963 had placed their first bombs in mail boxes and public buildings." Well no, the FLQ did not exist in 1963; it was the RIN.
Page 274 The people of Mulmur Township "still spoke in an Irish/English idiom that had survived from the nineteenth century....When they referred to slightly demented people they used the expression 'two bricks short of a load""-as though this cliché were not well known outside rustic Ontario, and indeed common throughout the English-speaking world, though possibly not so well known among University of Toronto academics.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

PoeMarie

Inspirational

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 2, 2012

Verified Purchase

This book is inspirational and realistic. If you're interested in writing, you'll know just what it takes to succeed. The book also arrived in good time and great shape. I have been please all the way around.

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers	Amazon Business Everything for your business	Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	Amazon Photos Unlimited Photo Storage Free With Prime	Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands

Warehouse Deals Open-Box Discounts	Whole Foods Market We Believe in Real Food	Amazon Renewed Like-new products you can trust	Blink Smart Security for Every Home

Follow the Author

The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out Kindle Edition

Product description

From the Back Cover

About the Author

Product details

About the author

Rosemary Sullivan

Customers who bought this item also bought

Customer reviews

Top reviews from Canada

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries