Marianne Brandis was born in
the Netherlands and came to Canada with her family in 1947; they lived in
British Columbia and Nova Scotia before moving to Ontario. She received a BA
and MA from McMaster University in Hamilton. During her middle years, in
addition to writing as a spare-time activity, she worked as a writer in private
radio stations and at the CBC. From 1967 to 1989 she taught writing and English
literature at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (Ryerson University) in Toronto;
she is now a full-time writer living in Stratford, Ontario.
She began writing
in her teens and experimented with short stories, plays, and poetry before
concentrating on novels. This Spring's Sowing, her first novel to be
published, appeared in 1970.
In 1977 she began
writing historical fiction. This led to the publication of The Tinderbox and its award-winning sequels The Quarter-Pie Window and The Sign of
the Scales. These novels are set in southern Ontario in the 1830s. Also
dealing with Canadian history, but not part of the series, are Fire Ship and Rebellion.
Marianne Brandis
has written about English history as well in a biographical novel for adult
readers titled Elizabeth, Duchess of Somerset.
Special Nests,
a short novel for adults, is, like This Spring’s Sowing, set in
modern-day Canada.
In her historical
fiction, Marianne's chief aim is to bring the past to life. She is less
interested in big events than in the texture and rhythm of ordinary people’s
lives, less interested in the public face of important people than in their
personal sides. Public events and important people are not ignored, however; it
is Marianne's goal to give the reader as vivid and true a picture as possible of
what it would have been like to live in a particular historical place and time.
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Then she moved into life-writing – another kind of history, a different way of bringing the past to life. Finding Words: A Writer’s Memoir appeared in 2000, followed by two chapbooks, Singularity and Belongings.
Once embarked on life-writing, Marianne began chronicling the lives of her creative family. Frontiers and Sanctuaries: A Woman’s Life in Holland and Canada is the biography of her mother Madzy, and “Artist at Work: Gerard Brender à Brandis, Wood Engraver and Bookwright” deals with the career of one of her brothers. To celebrate her father’s 100th birthday, Marianne wrote a short memoir titled Bill Brandis: A Green Old Age. Her latest work, Thinking Big, Building Small: Low-tech Solutions for Food, Water, and Energy, is about the life and work of her brother Jock Brandis. (Information about “Artist at Work” is under “Articles in journals; short stories, poetry, and work in anthologies”, and about the other titles under “Books in Print.”)
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A special area of Marianne’s work is her collaboration with her brother, Gerard Brender à Brandis, one of Canada’s best – and best-known – wood engravers and creators of hand-made limited-edition books. Gerard’s wood engravings enhance most of Marianne’s books about nineteenth-century Canada. In addition, their work appears together in several of the hand-made books which Gerard published. The most recent of these is A Pebble’s Journey: The Grand River Observed By Two Artists (details under “Rare, limited-edition, and out-of-print books”).
Their collaboration is always more than a mere joining of text and illustrations. Marianne and Gerard plan the whole work together, interweaving the book’s physical form with the subject-matter, the words with the images, so that the final creation produces an exceptionally rich artistic experience.
More information about Gerard and his work are at www.gerardbab.ca.
More information about their collaboration is at http://www.wix.com/enhancegraphics/start-may11#!__literature
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Note that
Marianne’s full surname is “Brender ŕ Brandis”: “Brandis” is the form she uses
as a nom de plume and for everyday wear. |
