Ethel Wilson: Stories, Essays, and Letters

Ann Nicholson was an associate editor at OISE Press, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto.

David Stouck reveals that the gentle, publicity-shy author Ethel Wilson (1888-1980) was something of a dark horse. Drawing on the Wilson papers at the University of British Columbia, Stouck dispels Wilson’s self-portrayed image as an amateur writer with a “gift” who, at age 60, wrote her first novel in three weeks, while her husband, a prominent Vancouver doctor, was away at a conference.

From Wilson’s notes and correspondence, we learn that beginning in the 1930s she took her writing seriously enough to try to place book manuscripts with major publishing houses in the United States. Nevertheless, she remained modest and self-effacing about her literary works throughout her long life. Her horror of publicity drew gentle admonishment from poet Dorothy Livesay in 1952.

Nine short stories are included in this work (eight of them previously unpublished). Five of these unpublished stories represent chapters edited out of the final version of The Innocent Traveller. The stories are interesting in themselves but are more so after reading Wilson’s correspondence with her long-time editor John Gray of Macmillan Publishing about their omission from Innocent Traveller.

The six essays give examples of Wilson’s critical writing. She expressed her views on Canadian literature, on being a writer, and on many literary issues of the l950s with insight and humour.

The letters make up the most interesting section of the book. We gain further insight into her close working relationship with John Gray. It was he who advised Wilson to cut many descriptive nature passages and to change the conclusion in Swamp Angel so that Vera Gurnason not be drowned. In a defensive letter to Gray in 1953, Wilson says of Swamp Angel, “My genre is very limited. It seems to be uneasy human relations and ‘Nature’ and things with relation People. Not exactly animism but tinged with … [t]he fear of sentimentality, tipping it back on the other side with a flat statement.”

Many of the letters are to fellow writers — Mazo de la Roche, Earle Birney, and Margaret Laurence. Desmond Pacey wrote to Wilson asking about her family background and literary career for an article he was writing. Her reply sheds a little light on her early childhood and background.

Stouck has given us more than a glimpse of this shy, complex author, and Wilson would probably have approved his decision to omit the more domestic and personal details from her letters. Nevertheless, Wilson remains something of an enigma. Stouck’s book will stimulate many to reread Wilson’s work, but as William French, the Globe and Mail’s book reviewer, remarks, “Stouck whets our appetites for a real biography of Ethel Wilson.”