Opinion: On 50th anniversary, The Book of Eve merits a revisit

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Posted By: jasabacklink November 1, 2023

As a teenager, I read Constance Beresford-Howe’s 1973 novel The Book of Eve in order to understand my mother. I read it a second time to understand myself. What I discovered instead was how the generation of my Quebec grandmothers lived with a startling lack of marital rights.

Set in mid-1960s Montreal, the novel centres on Eva, who has just received her first pension cheque and fled her “acidulous” ailing husband with absolutely no sense of guilt. “Nothing at all stirred except a quite objective interest in what would happen next.”

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She finds a basement apartment and isolates herself from family, friends and neighbours to keep responsibility at bay. But gradually she is drawn into the lives of others, including a persistently cheerful immigrant who becomes her lover.

On her daily walks around Montreal, Eva collects lost items: a broken umbrella, a page from a child’s exercise book, a silver spoon. Some are found art, some are to sell to bolster her $75-a-month pension.

After her late-life divorce, my mother also collected things, trolling thrift shops and had at one point a conga line of shoes in various sizes extending around her bedroom and down the hall to the living room. “For when I gain or lose weight,” she said. I found her exasperating.

But as someone recently turned 65, I have more empathy for my mother. And in looking for answers as to what my next stage of life might encompass, I re-read the novel by the undervalued Beresford-Howe, who died in 2016. I discovered again the deft writing (her marital home “full of clocks rustling their self-importance and coughing delicately like people in church.”)

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Yet in the re-read I was gobsmacked by Eva’s acceptance that she had no claim to the Montreal house she had helped purchase with her husband. Her name is not on title, only his. When she married in the 1920s, Quebec women could not be on title.

“Today, it boggles the mind,” the dean of McGill University’s faculty of law told me. I had turned to Robert Leckey to ask if Eva’s lack of rights were fact or literary construct. He confirmed that prior to 1965, when the law changed, Quebec married women did not have many marital rights.

“So what your character in the novel was facing was accurate,” he said. Women could not legally sign contracts and so could not be on property title.

My mother and I were both fortunate that when our marriages ended our names were on title of the homes we lived in and we did not have to pawn found items to buy food. But it is vital to remember the generations who went before us who might have had to do so.

We live in a time when the maintenance and improvement of women’s rights needs a palpable vigilance. From what we have seen in the U.S. we know women’s rights can be removed disturbingly quickly.

With an older woman who flees marriage at its centre, The Book of Eve is a rare novel and could be taught in university literature or women’s studies classes, yet it seems it is not. Of the four Canadian university bookstores contacted (a quick way to determine if it’s being taught) neither UBC, Calgary, Toronto or McGill universities stock the novel. (And Beresford-Howe taught at McGill!)

But on the 50th anniversary of its publication, The Book of Eve should be read and not just because it is a good read.

“I tell the students about Quebec family law in the 19th-century and about changes in the 1930s and 1960s,” Leckey said, “and looking at these young faces and to them they are thinking 1965 was a long time ago. But to us it was yesterday.”

Vivian Moreau is a freelance journalist based in Victoria, B.C.

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