TORONTO (AP) — From a park bench on the Victoria College campus, Margaret Atwood — class of 1961 — can trace her life of the mind.

"It was here that I decided to become a Victorian (literature student) at a time when it wasn't at all fashionable. They were considered gauche, kitsch, sentimental, absurd," she says, remembering the times she would dash back and forth across the park to take English classes on one side and history and philosophy on the other. "But the foundations of women's equality — John Stuart Mill, those kinds of thinkers — were Victorians and the position of women was a real...