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.

David Stouck is a biographer whose works include Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography, shortlisted for the VanCity Book Prize, and Collecting Stamps Would Have Been More Fun: The Correspondence of Sinclair Ross 1933-86, a finalist for the Alberta Book Prize. With Myler Wilkinson, he edited Genius of Place: Writing about British Columbia. He is professor emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University.

David Stouck's profile page

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

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