The Forest Lover

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Emily Carr (1871–1945) was a free and original spirit whose
penetrating eyes and bottomless curiosity enabled her to see her West
Coast world freshly and to capture it on vivid canvases. Moreover,
Carr’s patient research and sympathetic understanding of subjects who
were often shy and elusive allowed her to bring them alive to her
readers in a new way. Susan Vreeland shares many of Carr’s
characteristics.

The Forest Lover, Vreeland’s third novel about the lives of painters
and particular paintings, is a delight. In her autobiographical
introduction, Vreeland writes about coming to know Carr’s work in 1981
in the Emily Carr Gallery in Victoria. The author was struck by the
painter’s attitude toward her own work and by Carr’s desire to catch
“something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit.” Like Carr in
her paintings, Vreeland strives to catch in her fictionalized account
the spirit of Carr’s courageous and extraordinary life.

The book’s imaginative cover reflects Vreeland’s technique: a
circular porthole that reveals the young Carr’s face and shoulders is
set above a virgin West Coast landscape. The implicit suggestion is one
of the artist looking down and claiming this magnificent land as her
own. The book concludes with a mini-biography of Carr, as well as an
“author’s afterword” by Vreeland that delves into why she felt
compelled to study Carr at this point in her life.