As a close friend of novelist Ethel Wilson during her final 30 years of life, journalist and television producer Mary McAlpine, who was married to journalist Kildare Dobbs, revealed how the enigmatic Ethel Wilson combined an Edwardian sensibility with a modern mind in The Other Side of Silence: A Life of Ethel Wilson (Harbour, 1988).

Born in 1926, McAlpine had the support of the Wilson estate in writing the biography. The Mary McAlpine fonds at UBC Special Collections consist of correspondence, photographs, sound recordings, and subject files produced by McAlpine (formerly known as Mary McAlpine Dobbs) in the preparation of the biography. Correspondents include Ethel Wilson, Wallace Wilson, Margaret Laurence, Beverly Mitchell, Nan Chaney and Dorothy Livesay. There is a plaque for her in the Galiano Island cemetery. [See also David Stouck]

[BCBW 2015] "Literary Biography"

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
The Other Side of Silence: A Life of Ethel Wilson