Professing English: A Life of Roy Daniells

by Sandra Djwa

Sandra Djwa has provided readers with a fascinating a cultural biography with a human face. Roy Daniells (1902-1979), an English professor who finished his career at the University of British Columbia, and an outstanding scholar, teacher and poet, influenced at least four generations of students and is the subject of Professing English. Once established as a professor, Daniells was a key figure - a cultural catalyst - in the consolidation of English as a discipline and the development of Canadian literature as a recognised body of writing and a legitimate focus of scholarship, interacting with major personalities of the era like Earle Birney, Northrop Frye, E.J. Pratt, Sinclair Ross, Margaret Laurence and A.S.P. Woodhouse. Djwa's examination of his life is a moving personal story as well as a mini-history of literary studies in Canada. It is also the account of an individual struggling against a strict religious upbringing who turned instead to the devotional poets of the seventeenth century. In this biography, Daniells' life becomes a prism refracting aspects of the discipline - the old ties between religion and literature, the making of a professor, mentorship and the way it functioned, women in the academy and changes in the discipline and the professoriate. His devotion to English studies and his unflagging encouragement of young Canadian writers and students makes Daniells one of the greatest unsung heroes in recent history. Thanks to this wonderful biography, he will receive the recognition he so justly deserves.

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Sandra Djwa was born in Newfoundland and completed a B.Ed. at UBC (1964), and a Ph.D. (1968). She joined the English department at Simon Fraser in 1968 and taught Canadian literature until 2005.

Best known for her essays on poets and novelists (Atwood, Cohen, Lawrence), and as a biographer and editor, Djwa co-founded the Association of Canadian and Quebec Literatures in 1973, and wrote the annual survey of “Poetry” for Letters in Canada, UTQ, 1980-84. In 1981 she established the E.J. Pratt editorial committee and co-edited Complete Poems of E.J. Pratt with Gordon Moyles, and Selected Poems of E.J. Pratt with Zailig Pollock and W.J. Keith. She was Chair of the English Department at SFU between 1986 and 1994, President of the Chairs and Heads of English in 1989-90, and the first recipient of the Trimark Women’s Mentor Award for mentoring younger colleagues in 1999. She has been a member of the Royal Society of Canada since 1994.

She has published ten books including three major biographies. Her life of F.R. Scott, The Politics of the Imagination (1987), was short listed for the Hubert Evans B.C. Non-Fiction prize. Fifteen years after first publication, this biography was translated into French by Florence Bernard without any change in content as F.R. Scott: Une vie (2001). Highly praised in Québec, it was short-listed for the Governor-General's Award for French translation. Djwa has also edited and introduced the memoirs of Carl F. Klinck, Giving Canada a Literary History (1991), and edited and introduced various critical editions of E.J. Pratt's poetry.

Djwa's 2012 biography of poet P.K. Page, A Journey With No Maps, was shortlisted for the 2013 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, and won the 2013 Governor General Award for Non-Fiction.