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Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography (UTP $50)
Ethel Davis Bryant's home-sick mother died in childbirth in South Africa, before Ethel was two. Her baby brother died ten days later. But perhaps the event that most made her into a literary artist was the death of her beloved father, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, in England in 1897. He was only 40 and she was nine. "It is not to be described,"; she wrote, "how a child feels when the parent dies...and the world dies too for a long time in bewilderment.";
Sent to live with a maternal grandmother named Annie Malkin in remote Vancouver, the ten-year-old put on a brave face but her growth was stifled. Thereafter, according to her biographer David Stouck in Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography (UTP $50), she was always aware "chaos lurks beneath the smooth surface of events, that we always live on the brink.";
Stouck's scholarship is generous, responsible and clear. He shows how the fiction and life of Ethel Wilson were meshed, enhancing both.
A stellar student at Crofton House, the ravishingly beautiful 14-year-old was sent to a no-nonsense Methodist school in England-uprooted again-in 1902. Summers spent with monied relatives, a trip to Paris and Monte Carlo, and her Spartan boarding school brought fodder for fiction but little happiness. Shy but athletic, 'the school beauty' returned to Vancouver four years later with chilblains, a good tennis racket and a passion for the English language.
If a memoir-like novel called The Innocent Traveller is to be believed, Ethel Bryant was "an innocent imitation of grownupness...an innocent ninny."; For the next 13 years she reluctantly taught at four public schools while remaining constrained by her grandmother and aunts. Methodist Church members couldn't attend any parties where there would be dancing, they couldn't go to the circus or the theatre, and all games of chance were forbidden.
"It was not until I was married that I learned it was possible to enjoy life without first passing a moral judgement on it,"; she said. In Vancouver she was taught how to swim by the Creole lifeguard at English Bay, Joe Fortes, and she also took some private painting lessons from Emily Carr. "But as the lessons consisted entirely of conversation, and as I did not recognize genius, and I earned only $47.50 a month and had no talent, I could not afford to buy conversation.";
When Grandmother Malkin died at 86 in 1919, the woman once called 'the prettiest girl in Vancouver' was finally free to live independently, but her freedom at age 31 was mixed with chronic feelings of abandonment.
Full-blown happiness arrived in the form of Wallace Wilson, a doctor exactly her age. He became a caring and lifelong replacement for her lost father. They married at age 33, in 1921 and they became that rarity-an intensely happily married couple. By all accounts Wilson was a fine man, in both public and private. He became president of the B.C. and Canadian Medical Associations and, among many other things, Canada's first representative to the World Health Organization.
Rescued from her loneliness, as David Stouck puts it, Ethel Wilson began forays into the interior of the province with her husband, chiefly on fly fishing trips. Lac Le Jeune was their favoured haunt. These journeys awakened Wilson's remarkable appreciation for what she called 'the genius of place', essentially how geography can affect character, for better, or for worse.
"No other writer,"; George Woodcock later surmised, "has more successfully evoked British Columbia as a place or its inhabitants as a strange and unique people.";
Unable to have children, but fulfilled in their marriage, the Wilsons travelled in Europe, had servants, loved their dogs and generally lived very comfortably. The convivial Wallace always took the social lead; Ethel Wilson remained contentedly in his shadow, sophisticated but lacking a university degree and a driver's license. "People were universally fond of Wallace,"; writes Stouck, "finding him warm and charming. They were likely to find his wife a little cool and reserved, her wit sometimes too sharp for comfort.";
Ethel Wilson published her first magazine piece at age 49. The left-leaning New Statesman and Nation printed her story, "I Just Love Dogs.' Although she tended to present herself as a reluctant amateur at first, she was a late bloomer who did not lack ambition. She claimed to have written her first stories in the late 1930s in the family automobile while her husband called on the sick.
Her devoted Macmillan editor and publisher John Gray once compared her to someone who sits down at the piano for the first time and can play, but he was playing along. Ethel Wilson had honed her craft with a rigorous respect for the English sentence. Portions of her autobiographical story of the Malkin family and of a middle-aged woman coming to live in Vancouver from England and remaining as a relatively happy spinster past her 100th birthday, The Innocent Traveller, can be traced to preparatory writing 20 before the novel was published.
Ethel Wilson liked to go to movies in the afternoon alone. Protected by her husband, Wilson evolved self-deferentially but seriously and secretly in their spacious Kensington Place apartment overlooking False Creek. Her first novel is considered by some to be her best, even though Wilson herself was dismissive of it as 'amateur', 'slight' and 'hokum', once claiming Hetty Dorval (1947) was dashed off in just three weeks while Wallace Wilson was away 'in order to remain alive, sane and functioning.'
Hetty Dorval, the title character, is a beautiful older woman who mysteriously arrives in the ranching town of Lytton. A country girl named Frankie Burnaby immediately falls under her romantic spell. Hetty doesn't seem to play by society's rules. Gradually Frankie becomes aware how Hetty Dorval uses and disparages others, bewitching rich men when it suits her, but she's fascinated by Hetty's allure. Her parents try to protect Frankie, who is sent to school in England, but she must come-of-age on her own.
In this moral allegory, written just after World War II, the psychopathic Hetty Dorval ultimately finds herself at the mercy of Frankie, who gives the devilishly selfish siren a place to sleep one night. The last we hear of Hetty, she's headed to Vienna in 1939 with a man named Jules Stern. "Six weeks later the German Army occupied Vienna,"; Wilson writes. "There arose a wall of silence around the city, through which only faint confused sounds were sometimes heard."; The political subtext attracted offers from Hollywood for movie rights, but Wilson dallied, hoping for a British production instead.
Wilson's most celebrated and studied novel, Swamp Angel (1954), is full of symbols but it's less engaging as a story. It concerns the escape of Maggie Vardoe from an unhappy second marriage, taking flight to live among rough-hewn characters at a lodge at Lac Le Jeune. The Swamp Angel of the title refers to a revolver that is discarded. The novel has appealed to feminist analysis, but its charm lies mainly in Wilson's marvellously refined style. Stouck provides in-depth analysis of all Wilson's work, noting her importance as an oft-anthologized short story writer.
Wilson's writing attracted and influenced two budding Vancouver writers, Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro.
Laurence became like a daughter to Wilson. They traded at least 50 letters. To a friend, Laurence wrote about meeting Ethel Wilson initially in 1960 when Laurence was a struggling writer in Vancouver. "She is so terrific. I don't know how to describe her. She not only writes like an angel (in my opinion) but is, herself, a truly great lady-again, that probably sounds corny, but I don't know how to express it. Her husband is a doctor (retired) and they live in an apartment overlooking English Bay. She is very badly crippled with arthritis, but she never mentions her health. She is poised in the true way-she never makes other people feel gauche. And she is absolutely straight in her speech-she has no pretensions, nor does she say anything she doesn't mean, and yet she has a kind of sympathetic tact.";
Alice Munro, another 'housewife' in Vancouver, was also inspired by Wilson and benefited from her encouragement. For Munro, Wilson's writing afforded 'the glaze of perfect sentences'. "I was enormously excited by her work,"; Munro has recalled, "because her style was such an enormous pleasure in itself...It was important to me that a Canadian writer was using so elegant a style. You know, I don't mean style in the superficial sense, but that a point of view so complex and ironic was possible in Canadian literature."; Robertson Davies concurred, saying, "Ethel Wilson produces fiction as elegantly fashioned as any that is written elsewhere.";
Wilson steadfastly rejected the need to be Canadian. She also didn't believe Creative Writing classes were viable. "The conditions of privacy are the only conditions under which writing can be done."; She failed to equate the benefits rendered to her by her editor John Gray with the critical feedback engendered by Creative Writing students. A feud arose with UBC Creative Writing maven Earle Birney, who dissed Wilson for her 'queenly' attitude. In private she referred to 'poor industrious egotistic ambitious Earle!'
Shy and self-effacing until her Sixties, Wilson was briefly recognized as the grande dame of Canadian literature. Eric Nicol called her the First Lady of Letters in Canada. As her health and career were waning she wrote an unpublishable rant against juvenile delinquency, blaming the phenomenon mostly on mothers who chose to work, prompting a Macmillan reader to suggest that Ethel Wilson carried a chip on her shoulder for being childless.
As a critic, David Stouck doesn't wear blinkers either. He notes, that Wilson's perennial struggle with choosing titles for her books "reveals that there was something provisional and tentative in her approach to her art, that writing itself was more important [to her] than the grand designs of character and plot.";
Wilson's books never won awards but she received an honorary doctorate from UBC (where she was very well-connected), a Canada Council Medal, the Lorne Pierce Medal and the Order of Canada. Mostly wheelchair-bound in her 70s, she disliked using the telephone due to increasing deafness. Having herself undergone a mastectomy, she grew increasingly fearful about her husband's health. When he died of his seventh heart attack in 1966, her life became 'a bare desert' and she longed for death. It wouldn't come for 15 years.
Growing 'dumb and muttery' (her words), she suffered several strokes and was transferred to the Arbutus Nursing Home in Kitsilano in 1974. An aspiring academic named David Stouck visited her, but she was ill and permanently afflicted with lost love. Her last written message referred to her husband. "How I miss Father-I miss him daily."; Ethel Wilson died on December 22, 1980, a month prior to turning 93. 0-8020-8741-8
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2003]
Sent to live with a maternal grandmother named Annie Malkin in remote Vancouver, the ten-year-old put on a brave face but her growth was stifled. Thereafter, according to her biographer David Stouck in Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography (UTP $50), she was always aware "chaos lurks beneath the smooth surface of events, that we always live on the brink.";
Stouck's scholarship is generous, responsible and clear. He shows how the fiction and life of Ethel Wilson were meshed, enhancing both.
A stellar student at Crofton House, the ravishingly beautiful 14-year-old was sent to a no-nonsense Methodist school in England-uprooted again-in 1902. Summers spent with monied relatives, a trip to Paris and Monte Carlo, and her Spartan boarding school brought fodder for fiction but little happiness. Shy but athletic, 'the school beauty' returned to Vancouver four years later with chilblains, a good tennis racket and a passion for the English language.
If a memoir-like novel called The Innocent Traveller is to be believed, Ethel Bryant was "an innocent imitation of grownupness...an innocent ninny."; For the next 13 years she reluctantly taught at four public schools while remaining constrained by her grandmother and aunts. Methodist Church members couldn't attend any parties where there would be dancing, they couldn't go to the circus or the theatre, and all games of chance were forbidden.
"It was not until I was married that I learned it was possible to enjoy life without first passing a moral judgement on it,"; she said. In Vancouver she was taught how to swim by the Creole lifeguard at English Bay, Joe Fortes, and she also took some private painting lessons from Emily Carr. "But as the lessons consisted entirely of conversation, and as I did not recognize genius, and I earned only $47.50 a month and had no talent, I could not afford to buy conversation.";
When Grandmother Malkin died at 86 in 1919, the woman once called 'the prettiest girl in Vancouver' was finally free to live independently, but her freedom at age 31 was mixed with chronic feelings of abandonment.
Full-blown happiness arrived in the form of Wallace Wilson, a doctor exactly her age. He became a caring and lifelong replacement for her lost father. They married at age 33, in 1921 and they became that rarity-an intensely happily married couple. By all accounts Wilson was a fine man, in both public and private. He became president of the B.C. and Canadian Medical Associations and, among many other things, Canada's first representative to the World Health Organization.
Rescued from her loneliness, as David Stouck puts it, Ethel Wilson began forays into the interior of the province with her husband, chiefly on fly fishing trips. Lac Le Jeune was their favoured haunt. These journeys awakened Wilson's remarkable appreciation for what she called 'the genius of place', essentially how geography can affect character, for better, or for worse.
"No other writer,"; George Woodcock later surmised, "has more successfully evoked British Columbia as a place or its inhabitants as a strange and unique people.";
Unable to have children, but fulfilled in their marriage, the Wilsons travelled in Europe, had servants, loved their dogs and generally lived very comfortably. The convivial Wallace always took the social lead; Ethel Wilson remained contentedly in his shadow, sophisticated but lacking a university degree and a driver's license. "People were universally fond of Wallace,"; writes Stouck, "finding him warm and charming. They were likely to find his wife a little cool and reserved, her wit sometimes too sharp for comfort.";
Ethel Wilson published her first magazine piece at age 49. The left-leaning New Statesman and Nation printed her story, "I Just Love Dogs.' Although she tended to present herself as a reluctant amateur at first, she was a late bloomer who did not lack ambition. She claimed to have written her first stories in the late 1930s in the family automobile while her husband called on the sick.
Her devoted Macmillan editor and publisher John Gray once compared her to someone who sits down at the piano for the first time and can play, but he was playing along. Ethel Wilson had honed her craft with a rigorous respect for the English sentence. Portions of her autobiographical story of the Malkin family and of a middle-aged woman coming to live in Vancouver from England and remaining as a relatively happy spinster past her 100th birthday, The Innocent Traveller, can be traced to preparatory writing 20 before the novel was published.
Ethel Wilson liked to go to movies in the afternoon alone. Protected by her husband, Wilson evolved self-deferentially but seriously and secretly in their spacious Kensington Place apartment overlooking False Creek. Her first novel is considered by some to be her best, even though Wilson herself was dismissive of it as 'amateur', 'slight' and 'hokum', once claiming Hetty Dorval (1947) was dashed off in just three weeks while Wallace Wilson was away 'in order to remain alive, sane and functioning.'
Hetty Dorval, the title character, is a beautiful older woman who mysteriously arrives in the ranching town of Lytton. A country girl named Frankie Burnaby immediately falls under her romantic spell. Hetty doesn't seem to play by society's rules. Gradually Frankie becomes aware how Hetty Dorval uses and disparages others, bewitching rich men when it suits her, but she's fascinated by Hetty's allure. Her parents try to protect Frankie, who is sent to school in England, but she must come-of-age on her own.
In this moral allegory, written just after World War II, the psychopathic Hetty Dorval ultimately finds herself at the mercy of Frankie, who gives the devilishly selfish siren a place to sleep one night. The last we hear of Hetty, she's headed to Vienna in 1939 with a man named Jules Stern. "Six weeks later the German Army occupied Vienna,"; Wilson writes. "There arose a wall of silence around the city, through which only faint confused sounds were sometimes heard."; The political subtext attracted offers from Hollywood for movie rights, but Wilson dallied, hoping for a British production instead.
Wilson's most celebrated and studied novel, Swamp Angel (1954), is full of symbols but it's less engaging as a story. It concerns the escape of Maggie Vardoe from an unhappy second marriage, taking flight to live among rough-hewn characters at a lodge at Lac Le Jeune. The Swamp Angel of the title refers to a revolver that is discarded. The novel has appealed to feminist analysis, but its charm lies mainly in Wilson's marvellously refined style. Stouck provides in-depth analysis of all Wilson's work, noting her importance as an oft-anthologized short story writer.
Wilson's writing attracted and influenced two budding Vancouver writers, Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro.
Laurence became like a daughter to Wilson. They traded at least 50 letters. To a friend, Laurence wrote about meeting Ethel Wilson initially in 1960 when Laurence was a struggling writer in Vancouver. "She is so terrific. I don't know how to describe her. She not only writes like an angel (in my opinion) but is, herself, a truly great lady-again, that probably sounds corny, but I don't know how to express it. Her husband is a doctor (retired) and they live in an apartment overlooking English Bay. She is very badly crippled with arthritis, but she never mentions her health. She is poised in the true way-she never makes other people feel gauche. And she is absolutely straight in her speech-she has no pretensions, nor does she say anything she doesn't mean, and yet she has a kind of sympathetic tact.";
Alice Munro, another 'housewife' in Vancouver, was also inspired by Wilson and benefited from her encouragement. For Munro, Wilson's writing afforded 'the glaze of perfect sentences'. "I was enormously excited by her work,"; Munro has recalled, "because her style was such an enormous pleasure in itself...It was important to me that a Canadian writer was using so elegant a style. You know, I don't mean style in the superficial sense, but that a point of view so complex and ironic was possible in Canadian literature."; Robertson Davies concurred, saying, "Ethel Wilson produces fiction as elegantly fashioned as any that is written elsewhere.";
Wilson steadfastly rejected the need to be Canadian. She also didn't believe Creative Writing classes were viable. "The conditions of privacy are the only conditions under which writing can be done."; She failed to equate the benefits rendered to her by her editor John Gray with the critical feedback engendered by Creative Writing students. A feud arose with UBC Creative Writing maven Earle Birney, who dissed Wilson for her 'queenly' attitude. In private she referred to 'poor industrious egotistic ambitious Earle!'
Shy and self-effacing until her Sixties, Wilson was briefly recognized as the grande dame of Canadian literature. Eric Nicol called her the First Lady of Letters in Canada. As her health and career were waning she wrote an unpublishable rant against juvenile delinquency, blaming the phenomenon mostly on mothers who chose to work, prompting a Macmillan reader to suggest that Ethel Wilson carried a chip on her shoulder for being childless.
As a critic, David Stouck doesn't wear blinkers either. He notes, that Wilson's perennial struggle with choosing titles for her books "reveals that there was something provisional and tentative in her approach to her art, that writing itself was more important [to her] than the grand designs of character and plot.";
Wilson's books never won awards but she received an honorary doctorate from UBC (where she was very well-connected), a Canada Council Medal, the Lorne Pierce Medal and the Order of Canada. Mostly wheelchair-bound in her 70s, she disliked using the telephone due to increasing deafness. Having herself undergone a mastectomy, she grew increasingly fearful about her husband's health. When he died of his seventh heart attack in 1966, her life became 'a bare desert' and she longed for death. It wouldn't come for 15 years.
Growing 'dumb and muttery' (her words), she suffered several strokes and was transferred to the Arbutus Nursing Home in Kitsilano in 1974. An aspiring academic named David Stouck visited her, but she was ill and permanently afflicted with lost love. Her last written message referred to her husband. "How I miss Father-I miss him daily."; Ethel Wilson died on December 22, 1980, a month prior to turning 93. 0-8020-8741-8
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2003]
Submitted on August 20, 2003 in By David.
