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  • Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography
  • James King (bio)
David Stouck. Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography University of Toronto Press. xvii, 353. $50.00

In the preface to his well-researched, diligent, and often moving life of Ethel Wilson (1888-1980), David Stouck recounts several visits he made to the novelist in 1975, 1977, and 1980. At his final meeting, her physical presence 'had erased almost all evidence of the person who had once inhabited [her] body.' She remained that day 'silent and her opaque stare gave little sign of a knowing presence.' Unable to forge a connection between the woman he witnessed in her final years and the novelist of often uncompromisingly strong opinions, Stouck became obsessed with reconstructing the real Ethel Wilson, especially when she was ill served by Mary McAlpine's inaccurate and badly written The Other Side of Silence: A Life of Ethel Wilson (1988).

Ethel Wilson led a very conventional, comfortable life, although it was an existence beset with many sad moments. Her English missionary parents were far from home when Ethel Bryant was born on 20 January 1888 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa; after her mother died when she was eighteenth months old, her father returned to England, where he died in June 1897. A year later, Ethel went to Vancouver to live with her maternal grandmother, the indomitable and very religious Annie Malkin, who had settled in British Columbia only three years before. After attending Trinity Hall School in England, Ethel returned to Vancouver, where she became a schoolteacher. She married Dr Wallace Wilson in 1921, when she was thirty-three years old. Although she experienced some difficulties with her mother-in-law, the Wilson marriage was an extremely happy one. Dr [End Page 560] Wilson was a widely admired physician, and the shy, retiring Ethel was happy to assist him in every way she could.

Although Wilson let it be known that she was a late bloomer in the writing of fiction, Stouck presents some evidence that her literary aspirations existed much earlier than previously thought. In giving his book the subtitle 'A Critical Biography' he has made an error in judgment because the real subtitle should read: 'A Literary Biography.' Stouck does not evaluate or provide critical insights on any aspect of Wilson's work, but he is adept at showing how certain life incidents were worked into fiction, how the landscape of British Columbia influenced Wilson, and how she negotiated with agents and publishers. Stouck does not sufficiently analyse Wilson's unique brand of feminism; he pays little attention to what could now be called the postcolonial aspects of her writing.

Completely missing from Stouck's biography is Wilson's interior landscape, her own sense of subjectivity. To be fair, there is virtually no extant evidence outside the fiction to allow such a reconstruction. Wilson's friend Margaret Laurence, who as a youngster lost both her parents, wrote vividly and directly of the condition of orphanhood; Ethel Wilson would never have deigned to write about such matters openly in either fiction or non-fiction. For example, in Swamp Angel (1954), Nell, the elderly, mischievous former circus performer, cannot escape the deep-seated depression that has invaded her since the death of her husband. To some extent, Wilson, in creating Nell, was indirectly and perhaps unconsciously imagining what her life would be like without Wallace, who did not die until 1966. When her husband passed away, Wilson certainly saw the remainder of her life as an unhappy imprisonment.

David Stouck has written an excellent exterior view of Ethel Wilson's life. The novelist, who very much admired the virtues of restraint and reserve, would have applauded his sensitivity.

James King

James King, Department of English, McMaster University

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