Precocious in childhood, irrepressible in old age, Miss Topaz Edgeworth’s singular accomplishment is to live out an entire century in unflagging – and mostly oblivious – optimism. At once outmoded and unconventional, tyrannical and benign, Topaz leads a largely unexamined life. But the magical quality of her consciousness, revealed through stunning narrative technique, makes her into one of the most delightful characters in Canadian literature. Published in 1949, The Innocent Traveller is Ethel Wilson’s most original literary achievement.
Walking out on a demoralizing second marriage, Maggie Lloyd leaves Vancouver to work at a fishing lodge in the interior of British Columbia. But the serenity of Maggie’s new surroundings is soon disturbed by the irrational jealousy of the lodge-keeper’s wife. Restoring her own broken spirit, Maggie must also become a healer to others. In this, she is supported by her eccentric friend, Nell Severance, whose pearl-handled revolver – the Swamp Angel – becomes Maggie’s ambiguous talisman and the novel’s symbolic core. Ethel Wilson’s best-loved novel, Swamp Angel first appeared in 1954. It remains an astute and powerful study of one woman’s integrity and of the redemptive power of compassion.
The eighteen pieces collected in Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories bring together the many and subtle voices of Ethel Wilson, demonstrating her extraordinary range as a writer. From the gentle mockery of the title story to the absurdist reportage of “Mr. Sleepwalker,” Wilson exerts unerring narrative control. Revealing what is “simple and complicated and timeless” in everyday life, these stories also venture into irrational realms of experience where chance encounters assume a malevolent form and coincidence transmuted into nightmare. First published in 1961, Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories is a diverse and rewarding collection, unified by Ethel Wilson’s distinct and engaging wit.
Ethel Wilson is one of Canada's most important writers. This biography 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. 2003.
In the two novellas that make up The Equations of Love, Ethel Wilson describes ordinary people in perilous circumstances with extraordinary insight and compassion. “Tuesday and Wednesday” reconstructs the events of two days in the life of Mort and Myrtle Johnson, whose uninspired marriage is strangely transformed by the tragic intervention of fate. “Lilly’s Story” is the study of a woman who, protecting her daughter, invents a new identity for herself, only to live as a fugitive from her own happiness. Fist published in 1952, these intuitive and richly ironic stories reveal the unspoken longings and surprising motives that balance the equations of love.
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.
Ellen Guppy is the reluctant heroine of Ethel Wilson’s final novel,Love and Salt Water. Saddened by a painful childhood, Ellen has adopted a skeptical independence and learned too well to hold her heart in reserve. But, as the novel unfolds, Ellen undergoes something of a sea-change; learning to accept love along with the sorrow that is rarely far from love. First published in 1956,Love and Salt Wateris a mature and, at times, disturbing synthesis of Ethel Wilson’s major themes: the independence of human lives, the strange alchemy of chance, and the healing illumination of love.
A vivid, moving novel reminiscent of Anthony Doerr and Michael Ondaatje, about the entwined fates of two very different refugees. In 1940, as the shadow of war lengthens over Europe, three mysterious travelers enter a village in Spain. They have the appearance of Parisian intellectuals, but the trio of two men and a woman are starving and exhausted from crossing illegally through the Pyrenees. Their story, told over a period of 48 tense hours, is narrated by one of the men, who slowly accepts his unthinkable fate. In a voice despairing and elegant, he calmly considers what he should do, and weighs what any one life means. As he does so, his attention is caught by a five-year-old named Pia who wanders near his cafe table. To Pia he begins to address all that he thinks and feels in his final hours--envisioning a rich future life for her that both reflects and contrasts with his own. Meanwhile, in the 1980s, a woman named Pia seeks solitude on a remote island in the Atlantic, where she works at an inn and reflects on her chaotic childhood. As Pia's story begins, a raging storm engulfs the island and a boat flounders offshore. Pia and her fellow islanders rush to help--and past and present calamities collide. By turns elegiac and heart-pounding, a love letter in the guise of a song of despair, The Certainties is a moving and transformative blend of historical and speculative fiction--a novel that shows us what it means to bear witness, and to attend to those who seek refuge, past and present.
