Emily Carr.

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This excellent study of Emily Carr is an early volume in the Extraordinary Canadians series edited by John Ralston Saul. It is a bold publishing venture, nationalistic because concerned with an enduring Canadian heritage but not in any narrowly blinkered sense. It is intended not for specialists or academics but for the general reader often regarded as an endangered species. Written simply but without condescension, it can be read with profit by intelligent teenagers, by university students, or by mature adults seeking a clear and sensible introduction to its subject.

Not so much a biography as a multi-faceted portrait of a multi-faceted woman, it devotes short but perceptive chapters to all aspects of Emily Carr: as a young girl determined to be a painter; as an art student; as an independent member of what she considered a too-respectable family; as a woman breaking into what was then a masculine artistic world; as a unique explorer of “Indian” art and attitudes; as a loquacious and endearingly colloquial writer; and as a mystic visionary who found in the natural world, especially the British Columbia forests, an acute sense of the divine absent from institutionalized religion.

Lewis DeSoto, like his subject both a painter and a writer, is concerned less with the minute factual details of Carr’s life as with her general character, her instincts and obsessions—what makes her “tick.” Those who want fully documented records with every scrap of information footnoted can go elsewhere (there are numerous such studies, and DeSoto lists the best in his sources). What he gives us is an informed, deeply sympathetic, and totally credible view of a highly complex personality. Above all, he treats her interests and beliefs seriously, without ever becoming stuffy. Even those who consider themselves familiar with Carr’s life and works will derive new insights. Though financial considerations unfortunately, but inevitably, preclude illustrations, I can imagine no better introduction to one of Canada’s finest and most versatile artists.