Constance Beresford-Howe (1922-2016) may not be a household name today, but she should be. A professor, creative writing teacher and pioneering feminist novelist, she wrote 10 trail-blazing novels during her career – all of which dealt with women seeking identity and independence. Her most famous and successful novel, The Book of Eve –along with two others – was written right here in Leaside.
The Montreal years
Beresford-Howe came to Leaside from Montreal, where she was born in 1922. She attended McGill University and later Brown University in Rhode Island, where she earned her Ph.D. in literature. While still at McGill, she published her first novel The Unreasoning Heart in 1946. Three more novels followed – all of which focused on the emotional lives of young female characters. In a review of her third work, The Invisible Gate, Globe & Mail literary critic (and Leasider) William Arthur Deacon praised her as “the equal of any Canadian now writing” (Globe, Dec. 3, 1949). It was during this period (1949-1970) that Constance also joined the English faculty at McGill (a colleague was Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan); married her husband, French language teacher Christopher Pressnell; and adopted a son, Jeremy.
The Leaside years
Alarmed by the growing separatist violence in Montreal, Constance and her family moved to Toronto in August 1970 – purchasing a house at 16 Cameron Cresc. As she later told the Leaside Advertiser (March 28, 1983), they chose Leaside because one of her husband’s former students had grown up in Leaside and convinced them “to give the town a try.” They did and liked what they saw: “It’s just the nicest part of Toronto.”
At her house in Leaside Constance drafted her fifth novel – The Book of Eve (1973). Considered her masterpiece, it tells the story of Eva Carroll, a 65-year-old woman who decides one day, after 40 years of marriage, to leave her ailing, demanding and insensitive husband and start a new life. Reviewers highly praised the book, and it stayed on Canada’s bestseller list for at least 14 weeks – winning the Canadian Booksellers Award in 1974. It was later dramatized at Stratford, Ont. with Jessica Tandy as Eva, and released as a movie in 2003 starring Claire Bloom. Soon after the novel was published, Constance was hired to teach English literature and creative writing at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University) where she remained for the next 15 years. She also found herself in demand for interviews and lectures. This included a reading at the Leaside Public Library, which received a Canada Council grant to pay for her appearance there (Canada Council Award Report, 1973-74).
Constance wrote five more novels after Eve – as well as one screenplay for CBC-TV. Two novels – Night Studies (1985) and Prospero’s Daughter (1988) – were written in Leaside (see: Greg Gatenby, Toronto: A Literary Guide, p, 542). Two others – A Population of One (1976) and A Marriage Bed (1981) – were televised by the CBC. Her final novel, A Serious Widow (1991), was nominated for Ontario’s Trillium Award in 1992 but lost to Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips.
Later years and legacy
Constance Beresford-Howe retired from teaching in 1988. Three years later, she and her husband left Leaside for the UK where they lived for the next 25 years. She died on Jan. 20, 2016, at the age of 93. Two weeks later, her husband Christopher died following complications from surgery. They were married for 55 years.
In October 2019, the Writers Chapel Trust posthumously honoured Constance by unveiling a bronze plaque in her name at St. Jax Church in Montreal. She is one of several writers commemorated there, including Mavis Gallant, A.M. Klein and her old colleague from McGill, Hugh MacLennan.
While some feminists have criticized her work for not being vigorous enough in its questioning of patriarchal values, Beresford-Howe was nevertheless ahead of her time in exploring complex and often conflicting women’s issues both before and during the rise of feminism. She remains a respected writer and stylist with a loyal – if small – following. Ideally, that number will grow as more readers become familiar with the work of this significant Canadian novelist who called Leaside her home for over 20 years.
