From Stone Orchard: A Collection of Memories

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

George Woodcock (1912–1995), founder of the journal Canadian
Literature and author of nearly 150 books, was a quiet but authoritative
presence on the Canadian literary scene for nearly half a century.
Brought up in Britain, he was in his late 30s when he arrived in Canada
and in his mid–40s when he finally settled in Vancouver.

Woodcock is perhaps best known for his pioneering study of George
Orwell and for several books on anarchism in the 1940s. As a writer,
though, he ranged far and wide—poet, historian, critic, playwright,
biographer, essayist, political pamphleteer, travel writer, and reviewer
at large.

Douglas Fetherling, a poet and independent scholar, has written or
edited some 50 books, mostly in the areas of Canadian literature and
culture. He enjoyed Woodcock’s friendship for almost a
quarter-century, and was asked by him to write a book about his life and
work. Woodcock’s papers, a rich repository held at Queen’s
University, include thousands of letters dating back to 1928. One of
Fetherling’s goals in writing this book was to explain the British
Woodcock to Canadians and the older, Canadian Woodcock to the British.
His sympathetic study incorporates interviews with a great many of
Woodcock’s friends and acquaintances.

Fetherling does not expect The Gentle Anarchist to be the last word on
the subject; whatever its successors, the book stands on its own as a
well-researched and engaging portrait of a fascinating life.