After establishing herself as one of the leading 20th-century poets in Canada, the publication of Surfacing in 1972 instantly confirmed Margaret Atwood’s status as one the country’s most important novelists. Atwood’s unnamed heroine goes into the woods on a search for her missing father who may be mad and may still be alive. The woods represent an entry into her own psychic past as issues of environmentalism, American imperialism, and sexism are manifested in both literal and figurative imagery. In an interview Atwood said that "For me, the interesting thing in that book is the ghost in it, and that's what I like. And the other stuff is there, it's quite true, but it is a condition; it isn't, to me, what the book is about.”
While the novel is not autobiographical, Jill Dawson explained in The Guardian that “From the age of six months Atwood was familiar with the Canadian bush, accompanying her family and zoologist father on research trips, living in a log cabin ‘on a granite point a mile by water from a Quebec village so remote that the road went in only two years before I was born.’”
Surfacing strongly reflected the burgeoning feminist movement, and also elevated Atwood to the level of caretaker of postcolonial concerns. The novel’s direct concern is with thematic elements related to the identity of Quebec within the framework of outside influences of non-French Canada around it and America to the south.
The distinct anti-American sentiment expressed by characters throughout the novel served to create one of the most ironic casting decisions in film adaptation history when two American actors were chosen to play the two main characters in the 1981 film version of Surfacing. Further irony resulted from giving top billing to the male actor.
