Swamp Angel (New Canadian Library)

Description

Walking out on a demoralizing second marriage, Maggie Lloyd leaves Vancouver to work at a fishing lodge in the interior of British Columbia. But the serenity of Maggie’s new surroundings is soon disturbed by the irrational jealousy of the lodge-keeper’s wife. Restoring her own broken spirit, Maggie must also become a healer to others. In this, she is supported by her eccentric friend, Nell Severance, whose pearl-handled revolver – the Swamp Angel – becomes Maggie’s ambiguous talisman and the novel’s symbolic core.

Ethel Wilson’s best-loved novel, Swamp Angel first appeared in 1954. It remains an astute and powerful study of one woman’s integrity and of the redemptive power of compassion.

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Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography

Description

When Ethel Wilson published her first novel, Hetty Dorval, she was in her sixtieth year. With her subsequent books, among them the widely read Swamp Angel (1954), she established herself as one of Canada's most important writers. Although she fostered a reputation for being an unambitious latecomer, a happily married doctor's wife who wrote for her own pleasure, she in fact took her writing very seriously, trying for several years to place her work with major American publishers.

David Stouck's engaging biography of this elusive Canadian writer draws on archival material and interviews to describe, in detail, her early life as an orphan in England and Vancouver and her long writer's apprenticeship, spanning from the publication of some children's stories in 1919 to the appearance of Hetty Dorval in 1947. Stouck's narrative charts the resistance among publishers, critics, and readers to the curious mixture in her work of an Edwardian sensibility and a postmodern intelligence. He also documents her own resistance to both literary nationalism and creative writing classes as strategies for promoting literature. She was nevertheless one of the few Canadian women writers to emerge from the 1950s, and she is still being read - all her books remaining in print. Stouck observes that Wilson's writing is marked by epistemological and ethical uncertainties that are rooted in the contingencies of language, because, as Wilson herself liked to quote from Lewis Carroll, the 'meaning [of words depends on who is the master.' Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography is the story of a distinguished writer whose works are rightly considered classics of Canadian literature.

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Ethel Wilson: Stories, Essays, and Letters

Description

When Ethel Wilson published her first novel, Hetty Dorval, in 1947, she was nearly sixty years old. With her following books, she established herself as British Columbia’s most distinguished fiction writer and one of Canada’s best loved and most studied authors. Although she enjoyed and even encouraged her reputation as an unambitious latecomer who wrote for her own pleasure, she was, as David Stouck reveals in this book, a person who took her writing very seriously. Drawing on the Wilson papers held at the University of British Columbia, Stouck provides an important survey of Wilson’s talents while at the same time offering the fullest biography of the author to date.

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The Innocent Traveller (New Canadian Library)

Description

Precocious in childhood, irrepressible in old age, Miss Topaz Edgeworth’s singular accomplishment is to live out an entire century in unflagging – and mostly oblivious – optimism. At once outmoded and unconventional, tyrannical and benign, Topaz leads a largely unexamined life. But the magical quality of her consciousness, revealed through stunning narrative technique, makes her into one of the most delightful characters in Canadian literature. Published in 1949, The Innocent Traveller is Ethel Wilson’s most original literary achievement.

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Woodrow Wilson: A Bibliography (Bibliographies of the Presidents of the United States)

Description

Woodrow Wilson's presidency marked a seminal period in American history. Wilson's progressive reforms laid the foundation for FDR's New Deal and ushered the nation into its modern era. In foreign policy, his philosophy and the programs he implemented have influenced the United States' relationship with the rest of the world throughout the 20th-century. An extremely controversial president in his time, Wilson has grown in stature in the intervening years, though some remain critical of the direction in which he steered the United States. Complementing the 69-volume ^IPapers of Woodrow Wilson^R, this book provides a comprehensive guide to the secondary literature on Wilson.

The complexity of Wilson's personality and the intricacies of his thought have become evident with the publication of each volume of his papers, compelling scholars to reassess the often polemical portrayals of his presidency. This bibliography provides access to the literature on one of the most fascinating individuals to occupy the White House.

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Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories (New Canadian Library)

Description

The eighteen pieces collected in Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories bring together the many and subtle voices of Ethel Wilson, demonstrating her extraordinary range as a writer. From the gentle mockery of the title story to the absurdist reportage of “Mr. Sleepwalker,” Wilson exerts unerring narrative control. Revealing what is “simple and complicated and timeless” in everyday life, these stories also venture into irrational realms of experience where chance encounters assume a malevolent form and coincidence transmuted into nightmare.

First published in 1961, Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories is a diverse and rewarding collection, unified by Ethel Wilson’s distinct and engaging wit.

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