The Life of Jane continued

                         Chapter Five continued


     Jane loved to read and she did plenty of that at McGill. In first year arts she took latin, french, history and introductory english courses. She passed with high marks. She noticed when she came back to McGill the next fall, some people weren't there. They had probably failed three or more courses. If you did that, your university career was over at McGill.
    Jane ploughed on and chose to honour in English courses. She studied English literature and American literature too. Here, Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville and Hawthorne  took up a lot of space and time. In English literature, she studied authors like Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence and Arnold Bennett. She toiled over term papers on books by Fielding, Defoe and Sterne. She read and analyzed poems by John Donne, Ezra Pound , T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. Canadian novelists and poets didn't seem to show up on Jane's courses. Nor did women writers either.
    But then came time for fun. There was a winter carnival,dances and lots of movie dates that kept Jane  busy on weekends. She met boys in classes and on the campus. And though she was secretly engaged to John Tytherleigh, she went out with quite a few men.
     "My aim is to enjoy myself, get my degree, and then get married and have children," Jane told some of her friends one night as the sat in her room in the residence."Who knows what lies ahead after that." Most of her friends agreed with her. Career plans didn't seem to concern Jane's female classmates. As the 1980's women's generation used to say, "Back in the 1950's women didn't go to university to be doctors or lawyers. They went to university to meet and marry a doctor or a lawyer."