Description
When Ethel Wilson published her first novel, Hetty Dorval, in
1947, she was nearly sixty years old. With her following books, she
established herself as British Columbia's most distinguished
fiction writer and one of Canada's best loved and most studied
authors. Although she enjoyed and even encouraged her reputation as an
unambitious latecomer who wrote for her own pleasure, she was, as David
Stouck reveals in this book, a person who took her writing very
seriously. Drawing on the Wilson papers held at the University of
British Columbia, Stouck provides an important survey of Wilson's
talents while at the same time offering the fullest biography of the
author to date.
Reviews
Her personal recollections, her accounts of crises at the very moment of their happening, her long letters to John Gray... these are the most valuable documents we are given here. It is the partial opening of a literary treasure trove.
- Henry Kreisel
This volume is better than a biography because it is in Wilson's own words. It makes plain that she is more than a mere forerunner of the great flowering of Canadian fiction in the 1960s. It is, like its author, a handsome, charming, moving, illuminating book.
- Gordon Johnston