Morgan Hazzard is caught late in life between a cold husband and the self-righteous opinions of her grown children. Forty years of marriage to a hard, prairie-bred man have frozen her into the semblance of a meek and steadfast wife. But when a stroke silences William, Morgan's feelings begin to thaw. A quietly courageous woman emerges and starts to learn — on the eve of her seventy-fifth birthday — her own surprising strength and capacity for joy and change.

Morgan’s miserable marriage was not the beginning of her hardships. Life on the farm where she grew up was harsh. To her indifferent mother, she was just another mouth to feed. At sixteen, she was raped by an older brother who silenced her with threats; she was sent away to a convent to have and then give up the child. Two of her sons died very young. Her irascible husband, who himself was scarred by childhood horrors, derided her lack of interest in politics and wars, called her stupid, and crushed her confidence. Her six daughters, now living in other countries, criticize her for weakness, for her dislike of modernization and technology, without attempting to understand her. Morgan Hazzard is tired of being underestimated.

Suddenly freed from William’s influence by the stroke, which leaves him helpless and mute, she begins to act as she wants. She defies her bridge-playing friends and thwarts the money-grabbing plans of her son. She begins to live life consciously for the first time, reassessing her place in the world. At leisure to observe her surroundings, she sees the landscape afresh, in spite of failing eyesight. In a narrative woven together from diary entries, dreams, unsent letters to her girls, and the recollections she forces on William, an unexpected journey of self-discovery unfolds. An unlikely heroine, Morgan feels like “a lone explorer in an undiscovered land” as she faces the world without William, but her sense of humour and new-found self-worth sustain her. After years of enforced silence she is finding her own voice again. Finally putting aside the needs of her family and making peace with her past, Morgan learns to love herself, which seems a hopeful start. In this extraordinary but triumphant coming-of-age story, Morgan finds peace and self-reliance in her old age as she contemplates her future.
When The Wife Tree was published, the Ottawa Citizen said, “[Speak] creates Morgan as a complicated woman, at seventy-four still unsure of herself, still learning and yearning.” Speak is the author of two books of acclaimed short stories, and The Wife Tree, her much-anticipated first novel, has been compared to Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. Speak shares with them an interest in depicting real, recognizable people whose lives are less mundane than they first appear; a characteristic also of the work of Alice Munro. The Calgary Herald said: “Dorothy Speak has the remarkable ability to create mature female characters with whom we can readily empathize, and to translate the unspoken into language honestly, wisely and with insightful wit.”

Dorothy Speak's profile page

Dorothy Speak was born in Seaforth near Lake Huron and grew up in the small southern Ontario city of Woodstock. She has taught art history and creative writing, and was Curator of Inuit Art at the Glenbow Museum in the eighties. She has published two acclaimed short story collections, The Counsel of the Moon in 1990 and Object of Your Love in 1996, which was also published in the U.S. and China. Her work has been anthologized in the Journey Prize Anthology (1994) and the Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women (1997).

Though she has lived in Ottawa for twenth-five years, “Southern Ontario has been and I think always will be my spiritual landscape. I feel very rooted there, emotionally and esthetically.” Street names and landmarks of Woodstock show up in The Wife Tree, though the setting is reminiscent of any small city in southwestern Ontario — a region that has spawned novelists such as Bonnie Burnard, Joan Barfoot and Alice Munro.

Speak got some of her inspiration for The Wife Tree from the lives of her parents. Her mother was born in Huron County, her father in Saskatchewan. Like the Hazzards, her parents met when her mother visited a sister in the West during the Second World War. Her father remained attached to the prairies, “but at the time, it was a dust bowl and there were hardships and poverty and motherlessness…. He, like William, was a man whose origins frustrated his ambitions.” Her mother eventually went blind from macular degeneration, and after the death of Speak’s father, she became increasingly lonely and isolated. “I was curious about how a woman of her generation could deal with [widowhood],” Speak says.

While circumstances within the book were inspired by her own family, “My mother never became a rebellious woman who rejected her children or who got to the point where she didn’t need them… She never rebelled against the church.” The seven Speak children moved away from home, but “We were a very devoted family and in my parents’ declining years, we were always there.”

In a novel rich in the details of early 20th-century Ontario, Speak presents a vivid picture of a generation of women. “I wanted to look at someone in her senior years…looking back on her life and seeing she had made mistakes, she had missed opportunities, she had allowed things to happen that she regretted and how she could…come to terms with these and become a new person and redirect her destiny.” The discoveries she made when she took this germ of an idea and explored it in fiction are what make writing exciting for Speak.

This is familiar territory for Speak, who explored similar moments in Object of Your Love, her most recent book of short stories, which was called “psychologically astute” by Ottawa X Press. The nine stories tell of the disappointments and reconciliations of women whose lives have fallen out from under them, who are abandoned by daughters or husbands, who must rise from seemingly devastating situations. Salvation comes through small acts of defiance and through slow self-recovery. The Wife Tree grew from the seed of a story in that collection called “Stroke.”

The U.S. publication Kirkus Reviews observed of Object of Your Love several of her female characters are “women who sin more than they’re sinned against.” One character avenges herself on her family who exploit and ignore her only to realize that, by failing to set a loving example, she has sealed her own daughter’s fate. Failed love and the ways in which, as humans, we cannot always provide fully for our loved ones, is a recurring theme. But Speak does not condemn her characters for their failures. In The Wife Tree, Morgan recalls how she forced William to marry her, to stay with her; she considers how imperfectly she loved Morris, recalls times when her children might have felt a need for more parental love. She remembers how her own mother was trapped and warped by the demands of her many children. In the end, she comes to a tough but liberating realization that she might have to abandon the needs of the family to allow her self to thrive.

Speak’s short stories received high praise from such writers as Timothy Findley and Margaret Atwood. The pieces were well received by literary magazines and periodicals before being published in book form. W.P. Kinsella said, “Dorothy Speak can run with the best storytellers: Alice Munro, Ellen Gilchrist, Alice Adams, Joyce Carol Oates...” Although Speak has been writing for twenty years, she knew that crafting a novel would present a number of new challenges structurally. “I had to see the world in a different way, I had to look at life as a continuum,” she explains. “With a novel, I had to consciously construct.” In her short stories, she had thought of her material as “a lake, a pool. Here, I had to turn that material into a river and make it flow.” This meant being able to discover her characters every day she sat down to write.

“The more life experiences you have, the more deeply you write. I couldn’t have written this book ten years ago. You understand life so much better and there are insights you didn’t see when you were twenty,” she admits. With sharp insights about sex, love, marriage and aging, The Wife Tree is a compelling novel full of wit and wisdom.

“Dorothy Speak is one of our country’s finest writers and the story is full of startling revelations and starbursts of language…” — W.P. Kinsella

“[This] novel, Speak’s first after two acclaimed story collections…is beautifully written…[an] absorbing novel.” — Georgia Straight

“Sometimes you pick up a book and you just cannot put it down. The words leap off the page, seemingly written just for you, or even more spookily, written about you. That’s how I felt when I read Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners…I experiences that same thrill of recognition with The Wife Tree…With The Wife Tree, Dorothy Speak has earned a berth in the CanLit hall of fame, right alongside Laurence.” — New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal

“Speak evokes here the colours, smells, and sounds of fall and winter with great finesse. She also sets up several plot twists that carry the story forward in a compelling manner…This is an angry book where the good characters get the best lines and the bad ones have no more life than William, imprisoned in his stroke-paralyzed body.” — Q & Q

“Speak stands alongside Margaret Laurence and Constance Beresford-Howe in portraying indelible older women.” — Kitchener-Waterloo Record

“Rooted firmly in the tradition of the Ontario Gothic, the sotry of [Morgan] Hazzard delivers literary pleasures of the hightest order. Weaving together recollection, dreams, and letters never sent, the narrative moves with a fluid power through the four seasons, reaching its climax in the depth of winter, and concluding on a triumphant, summery note…Speak is also blessed with a gift for black humour and a hardnosed empathy, which resists easy reduction to the maudlin or sentimental.” — Ottawa X Press

“Morgan Hazzard is a unique and memorable character…” — Montreal Gazette

“…The Wife Tree is a powerful novel, well worth reading for Speak’s ability to slice through to the ugliness in the human heart.” — Victoria Times Colonist

“Like Carol Shields, Dorothy Speak has the remarkable ability to create mature female characters with whom we can readily empathize, and to translate the unspoken into language honestly, wisely and with insightful wit.” — Pearl Luke, Calgary Herald

“There are small surprises in the novel — acts of rebellion and secrets revealed — all part of Morgan’s trek along the familiar road to self-actualization. In the end, what makes her an interesting character are her sharp insights abut sex, love, marriage and aging.” — Globe and Mail

“The Wife Tree has strong narrative drive, vigorous prose enlivened by touches of eloquence and insight.” — Philip Marchand, Toronto Star

“There’s something fascinating and frightening in reading a writer who is willing to take risks. Because we’re conscious of the dangers lurking at the turn of a page, it’s particularly exhilarating when, as in this first novel, the writer succeeds so brilliantly. With The Wife Tree, Dorothy Speak moves firmly into the first rank of Canadian writers.” — Ottawa Citizen

“…[T]his superb first novel is…a…layered and complex exploration of love and what really stands between Morgan and happiness…Dorothy Speak is someone to sit up and take note of…Like [Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence], she writes about real, believable people, and makes compelling stories out of the mundane elements of their lives…The writing is deliberate and lyrical, lavish and full of pictures; the sense of character is intimate…Speak’s splendid first novel fills us with sumptuous detail…” — Hamilton Spectator

“The Wife Tree doesn’t disappoint. In a finely constructed story of betrayal and redemption, Speak’s novel demonstrates that she can sustain a singular voice across a broader genre with the same wit and wisdom evidenced in her earlier works…The Wife Tree is both a backwards journey and a fresh look at the future…It’s a triumphant novel.” — Edmonton Journal