The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out by Sullivan, Rosemary - 1998

Toronto: Harper Flamingo Canada, 1998. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Near Fine/Fine. 8vo. Glossy B&W pictorial paper boards, unlettered spine. Spine slightly tilted. Ink ownership inscription to title page. Toning to edges of pages. Dust jacket starting to tan. Award-winning biographer and poet Rosemary Sullivan explores the unfolding of a remarkable writer's career. She traces Atwood's early days in Northern Canada, where she spent many months each year as her entomologist father conducted his research and her mother contrived to make a family life possible in primitive conditions. Through her undergraduate years at Victoria College, Toronto, and her graduate studies at Radcliffe, Atwood began to lay the foundation for her writing life. She also began to explore the romantic distortions that warp the relations between men and women. In The Red Shoes, Sullivan focuses on Atwood's formative years through to the late 1970s when the major elements of Atwood's life - the happy and settled relationship with writer Graeme Gibson, the publication of Surfacing, Power Politics, The Edible Woman, the birth of a daughter, the focus on Canadian culture - are set in place.