"Othello" written by William Shakespeare play explores themes of jealousy, manipulation, betrayal

Introduction: Margaret Atwood

                       Margaret Atwood is a prolific Canadian litterateur. She is a leading Canadian poet, short story writer, novelist and critic. born on November 18, 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario to Carl Edmund Atwood and Margaret Killam Atwood, she is second of their three children, son Harlod and sister Ruth. The family moved from Ottawa to Toronto during the years 1946-61, where her father an entomologist, was a member of the faculty at the university of Toronto. Margaret attend Leaside High school in Toronto between 1952-1957.

                      She started writing when she was sixteen. During 1963-65 Margaret Atwood also taught composition and literature at the university of British Columbia. In 1965, she received the president's award followed by Governor General's award next year for her anthology of poems, The Circle Geune. Her collection of poems, The Animals in That Country, won the first prize at the Centennial Commission Poetry Competition in 1967 and in 1969, she received the Union Poetry Prize.
                            Margaret Atwood taught at the York university, Toronto during 1971-72. Her novel, Surfacing was published in 1973, as also Survival: AThematic Guide to Canadian Literature 1972-73,she was Writer in Residence at the university of Toronto.
                  She wrote a lot of work in her life. In 2000, Margaret Atwood made her forurth appearance in the shortlist with The Blind Assassin, the powerful story of an 82-years old women as she looks back on her life. When she won the coveted honour, Simon Jenkins remarked: "Margaret Atwood has been three times the bridesmaid and now the bride."

Surfacing: Summary of the Novel

                             Surfacing(1972) is Margaret Atwood's second and most poetic novel. When first published, it was reviewed "almost exclusively as a feminist or ecological treatise, in Canada it reviewed almost exclusively as a nationalistic one". In Britain where the novel was published early in 1973, these political implications were of less importance than its theme of psychological quest and The Sunday Times reviewer praised it for what has come to be recognised as Atwood's characteristic doubleness of vision, "the balance between the narrator's interior vision and sharp observation of the real world outside for head".

                At the surface level, Surfacing has a simple story. The unnamed protagonist of the novel comes back from Toronto to Northen Quebec, where she lived as a child to look for her father who is reported to have disappeared mysteriously. The protagonist now works as a commercial artist and she seems to have returned to the place after nine years. She had totally cut herself off from her parents all these years, except that she once visited her ailing mother in hospital. Her long separation had been deliberate as she was in love with a married man who exploited her innocence, made her pregnant and then refused to marry her, saying that he was already married and had children. He suggested that she undergo an abortion to get out of the situation she had landed herself into. She had the pregnancy terminated against her wishes and could not face her parents after this incident.
                  She sent her parents a postcard giving a different version, thinking that they would be shocked to learn of reality. Unable to cope with painful reality herself, she devised a more acceptable reality for herself as well. She imagined that she was married and had a child. But she had lost him to her husband whom she divorced. She gave her parents this story about the disastrous incident in her life.
                   She now decides to return to the island because her botanist father is reported to be missing from his cabin on a lake somewhere in the Laurentian Shield county. She wants to locate him to unveil the mystery. Her father's friend, Paul has written to her that her father has mysteriously vanished and that nobody has been able to locate him. She decides to search for him herself. There are several possibilities, he may be lost in the woods or he may have gone mad or he may be dead.
                        The unnamed heroine comes to the island with her three companions, her lover joe with whom she is sharing a flat in the city and her casual friends, David and Anna, who are husband and wife.
                        All along her search for her father, she wishes him to be alive, but finally she discovers that he is dead. He got drowned. The question that disturbs her wheather her father got drowned by accident or by the evil designs of America's notorious Central Intelligence Agency. She is unable to solve this mystery.
                           However, the fact of her father's death by drowning brings back to her all the traumatic memories of the aborted foetus...........

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