FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Ethel Wilson published her first novel, Hetty Dorval, she was in her sixtieth year. With her subsequent books, among them the widely read Swamp Angel (1954), she established herself as one of Canada's most important writers. David Stouck's engaging biography of this elusive Canadian writer draws on archival material and interviews to describe, in detail, her early life as an orphan in England and Vancouver and her long writer's apprenticeship, spanning from the publication of some children's stories in 1919 to the appearance of Hetty Dorval in 1947. Stouck's narrative charts the resistance among publishers, critics, and readers to the curious mixture in her work of an Edwardian sensibility and a postmodern intellignce. He also documents her own resistance to both literary nationalism and creative writing classes as strategies for promoting literature. She was nevertheless one of the few Canadian women writers to emerge from the 1950s, and she is still being read, all her books remaining in print.

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