Ground to Stand on : A Canadian Literary Life

“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 ancestry and her Newfoundland sense of belonging.