This collection of ten essays by American and Canadian scholars provides an engaging appraisal of Canada's contemporary women writers at work. Who is the Canadian woman writer? What themes unify the remarkable women writers who have emerged in Canada and occupy so prominent a position in the literary landscape? These questions are addressed here in criticism that defines the Canadian woman writer by her ever-pervasive quest for identity. For the general reader as well as the scholar these essays offer revealing insight into fiction by Margaret Atwood, Sandra Birdsell, Marie-Claire Blais, Beatrice Culleton, Mavis Gallant, Anne Hebert, Janette Turner Hospital, Isabel Huggan, Joy Kogawa, Alice Munro, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Carol Shields, Audrey Thomas, and Jane Urquhart and show how their works mirror the character of contemporary Canadian literature. Central to their fiction are the themes of memory, family, space, and identity. However, it is the search for identity - national, ethnic, racial, individual - that the editor finds to be the linchpin uniting them. No critic would characterize these writers as an amalgamated group, yet in seeing them together here, a reader discerns both the importance of identity for each and the nature of being a woman who has emerged as a writer in Canada.