Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography

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.

Ethel Wilson is an intriguing figure, a talented writer who put living
ahead of writing and who cared little for forging a reputation as a
writer. Born in London, England, the only child of Methodist
missionaries, Ethel Bryant was orphaned at the age of 10 and travelled
alone across an ocean and a continent companioned only by a beautiful
doll. She went to live in Vancouver with her maternal grandmother, Annie
Malkin. In London, Ethel had had free access to an extensive library. In
Vancouver, she was well cared for and sent to private schools but felt
emotionally abandoned. David Stouck sees in these contrasts the shaping
forces of the writer’s imagination. Ethel channeled her insecurity
into a search for a moral order based on love, faith, and
responsibility.

With meticulous detail, Stouck traces the writer’s education and
maturation in Vancouver. She became a primary-school teacher. Her
marriage in 1921 to Wallace Wilson, a physician, was the linchpin of her
life. In letters, Ethel Wilson described their marriage as deeply happy,
“wonderful … beyond imagination.” Both Ethel and Wallace loved
camping in wilderness terrain.

Ethel began to publish, yet confided to a friend that writing for
publication seemed absurd, “bumptious.” Between 1947 and 1961, she
published five novels, one book of stories, and scores of articles. Her
best-known fictions are Hetty Dorval, The Equations of Love, Swamp
Angel, and Love and Salt Water; her last book was Mrs. Golightly and
Other Stories (1961). Years later, Hugo McPherson would describe
Wilson’s fiction as showing “life without plot, but full of
meaning.”

Wallace died in the spring of 1966. Ethel was devastated. She survived
until 1980, dying a month before her 93rd birthday. Margaret Laurence
called her “a splendid writer and a great lady.” David Staines, dean
of arts at the University of Ottawa, calls this biography “an immense
work of scholarship” written with sensibility and tact. These
accolades are well deserved.

Stouck’s meticulously researched biography draws on a wealth of
archival material and on numerous interviews. He finds Wilson’s work
to be an unusual mix of Edwardian sensibility, a very modern
intelligence, and the ability to summon up the “genius” of a place
and to project it in landscape and a story. Stouck has chosen his
subject well, and his work is a worthy tribute and memorial to Ethel
Wilson.