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. Especially interesting is Wilson's previously unpublished correspondence with her editor John Gray and with fellow writers such as Mazo de la Roche, Earle Birney, Dorothy Livesay, and Margaret Laurence. Nine short stories are included in this volume, eight of which are previously unpublished and one which is reprinted for the first time in a collection of Wilson's work. |