Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     vii
Introduction   Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis     1
Doris Lessing: Spiraling the Waves of Detachment
"Sleepers Wake": The Surfacing of Buried Grief in Doris Lessing's love, again, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, and Margaret Drabble's The Seven Sisters   Virginia Tiger     27
Navigating the Spiritual Cycle in Memoirs of a Survivor and Shikasta   Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis     47
Through the "Wall": Crone Journeys of Enlightenment and Creativity in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Keri Hulme, and Other Women Writers   Sharon R. Wilson     83
Margaret Atwood: Doubling Back Through the Labyrinth
Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin as Spiritual Adventure   Earl G. Ingersoll     105
"And They Went to Bury Her": Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin and The Robber Bride   Debrah Raschke   Sarah Appleton     126
Atwood's Space Crone: Alchemical Vision and Revision in Morning in the Burned House   Kathryn VanSpanckeren     153
Spiritual Adventuring by Other Contemporary Women Writers
"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall": Fay Weldon's Elder Fairy Tale   Roberta Rubenstein     183
On the Road Again: Aritha Van Herk's No Fixed Address and Suzette Mayr's The Widows   Sally Chivers     200
So Much Depends Upon a Ya-Ya Scrapbook:Trauma, Figured and Reconfigured   Sandra Singer     216
Surviving the Colonialist Legacy of the Klondike Gold Rush: A Native Woman Elder's Liberatory and Integrative Storytelling Turn   Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez     241
"Soul Murder" and Rebirth: Trauma, Narrative, and Imagination in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night   Jeanie E. Warnock     270
Notes on Contributors     299
Index     303