Constance Beresford-Howe Tribute

You are invited to the unveiling of a commemorative plaque for novelist and academic Constance Beresford-Howe (1922-2016). A reception with wine and cheese will follow.

Now almost forgotten and seriously neglected by feminist scholarship, Constance Beresford-Howe was a truly ground-breaking forerunner to contemporary feminist activism. Born in 1922 in Montreal of a middle-class Anglophone family, she went on to earn a doctorate from Brown University in the United States and to join the English Department at McGill University in Montreal where, among other subjects, she pioneered in the teaching of creative writing. She scored a major coup when her first novel, The Invisible Gate is written in her early twenties, was published by a prestigious American publisher, Dodd Mead in 1949. She went on to publish a total of ten significant novels developing a strong voice on women’s issues at a time when the literary world, with a few exceptions, was the domain of male authors.