About BC Books Online
BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
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.
Contributor Notes
David Stouck is a professor in the English Department at Simon Fraser University.
Editorial Reviews
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.
— The American Review of Canadian Studies
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.
— Essays on Canadian Writing
