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“Now, don’t you ever leave Newfoundland,” Premier Joey Smallwood told seventeen-year-old Sandra Djwa in 1956. But leave she did – only to return decades later as a pathbreaking literary scholar and one of Canada’s most influential female academics, carrying with her a remarkable legacy of intellectual nation-building.
Part memoir and part literary history, Ground to Stand On traces a life in letters that was often ahead of its time. In a voice by turns quizzical, amused, and indignant, Djwa offers an immersive account of the struggles and achievements of the first generations of women professors in a male-dominated academy while charting the emergence of Canadian literature as a respected field of study. Along the way, she sketches incisive portraits of Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Michael Crummey, Northrop Frye, and Pierre Trudeau. Revisiting her acclaimed biographies of F.R. Scott, Roy Daniells, and P.K. Page, Djwa enriches them with fresh reflections on the art and challenges of literary biography.
Scholarship on Canadian poetry and criticism does more than record: it shapes cultural belonging. Ground to Stand On is a meditation on selfhood, memory, and place, culminating in Djwa’s reckoning with her ancestry and her Newfoundland sense of belonging.
“The birth of Canadian studies and the entry of women into academia are vital developments at the heart of this highly readable literary autobiography. An acclaimed scholar at the centre of monumental change in the world of scholarship and a highly respected biographer of unquestionably influential figures, Sandra Djwa has written her own story with both ease and sophistication.” Hugh Johnston, Simon Fraser University
“One of Canada’s pre-eminent biographers and literary historians, Sandra Djwa turns the lens on her own groundbreaking life with this immensely readable coast-to-coast memoir. It’s a front-row seat on the development of CanLit and Canadian studies, a reflection on the art and forensics of literary biography, and a testament to the energy and initiative of her generation of gutsy academic women.” Heather Murray, University of Toronto
“Sandra Djwa’s autobiography, Ground to Stand On: A Canadian Literary Life, is like an in-depth conversation with a brilliant, accomplished new friend. Women like myself who entered higher education in the 1960s and 1970s will identify with her struggles in male-dominated academia, and her experiences with American professors who viewed Canada as second-rate.” Ruth Latta, Compulsive Reader
Sandra Djwa is professor emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University, and the prize-winning
author of The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott and Professing English: A Life of Roy Daniells.