Ethel Wilson

Canadian novelist and short-story writer.

• Born: January 20, 1888
• Birthplace: Port Elizabeth, South Africa
• Died: December 22, 1980
• Place of death: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Biography

Ethel Davis Bryant Wilson was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, on January 20, 1888, to Robert William Bryant and Lila (Malkin) Bryant. Her mother died when she was only two, and her father took her to Staffordshire, England, to be reared by her maternal grandmother and successive aunts and uncles. Her family members were involved in a number of literary activities, including reading, journalism, and translation, and were acquainted with Matthew Arnold and Arnold Bennett. This literary atmosphere no doubt stimulated her interest in letters, and the literary allusions and quotations in her works demonstrate a comprehensive familiarity with the English tradition. Her father died when she was ten, and she went to Vancouver, British Columbia, to join her grandmother, who had moved there. Many of these family and early personal experiences are recounted in The Innocent Traveller, the semibiographical novel based on the life of her aunt.

In Vancouver, Wilson attended Miss Gordon’s School, but she was sent to Trinity Hall School in Southport, England, for her secondary education. In 1907, she graduated from Vancouver Normal School with a Second Class Teacher’s Certificate. Between 1907 and 1920, she taught in Vancouver elementary schools.

On January 4, 1921, Wilson married Wallace Wilson. Their marriage was a happy one, marked by much traveling in Canada, Europe, and around the Mediterranean, and the successful development of both their careers. Her husband became a respected physician; he studied internal medicine in Vienna in 1930, represented Canada at the British Medical Association’s convention in 1938 and at the World Health Organization in Paris in 1947, and was president of the Canadian Medical Association in 1946 and 1947. The relationship between the Wilsons may have provided details for the happy marriages and the deepening love relationships in Hetty Dorval, Lilly’s Story, and Love and Salt Water. The love of travel is also obvious in her work; travel is healing, broadening, and sensitizing to her characters, and Wilson’s ability to describe the essential atmosphere of various locales is one of her strongest attributes.

Wilson published her first short story in 1937, at the age of forty-nine, and another in 1939 before her career was interrupted by World War II. Although her husband was in the Canadian army, and although Wilson herself served by editing a Red Cross magazine between 1940 and 1945, she made little use of wartime experiences in her novels, except tangentially in The Innocent Traveller and Love and Salt Water. Only the short story "We Have to Sit Opposite" deals specifically with wartime problems.

It is likely that Wilson’s career in writing was encouraged by ill health. She was a victim of arthritis, which by 1956 had become so severe that she could not walk around in London, an experience she described in her essay "To Keep the Memory of So Worthy a Friend." She wrote, "One of the advantages of being lame is that one can sit and think. . . . And so I often think and think." In her last three novels, several major characters suffer handicaps, either physical or psychological, which affect their relationships with others in various ways and which must be transcended. No doubt her own disability enabled her to interpret this theme sympathetically.

The late 1940s and the 1950s were Wilson’s most productive years; all of her novels and most of her short stories and essays were written or published during that period. At the peak of her success, after the publication of Swamp Angel, she received three awards: an honorary doctorate from the University of British Columbia in 1955, a special medal from the Canada Council in 1961 for contributions to Canadian literature, and the Lorne Pierce Gold Medal from the Royal Society of Canada in 1964. Wilson's husband died in 1966, and she lived in retirement in Vancouver until her death in 1980.

Perhaps because Wilson did not attempt to follow literary trends, and perhaps also because she began publishing relatively late in life, her works did not have a dramatic effect on Canadian letters. She was publishing out of her generation, and her realism and understatement seemed somewhat old-fashioned to those authors who were following naturalistic trends. Still, she was influential in raising the quality of the art in Canada and in quietly introducing the theme of women "finding themselves" well before the theme became popular among feminists. Her heroines are not necessarily strong or aggressive, but they mature, meet the vicissitudes of their lives with determination and ingenuity, and for the most part succeed in small but important ways. Wilson’s treatment of this theme and her impeccable craftsmanship contributed significantly to the maturing of the novel in Canada.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Hetty Dorval, 1947

The Innocent Traveller, 1949

The Equations of Love, 1952

Lilly’s Story, 1953

Swamp Angel, 1954

Love and Salt Water, 1956

Short Fiction:

Mrs. Golightly, and Other Stories, 1961

Miscellaneous:

Ethel Wilson: Stories, Essays, and Letters, 1987 (David Stouck, editor)

Bibliography

Bhelande, Anjali. Self Beyond Self: Ethel Wilson and Indian Philosophical Thought. Mumbaim, India: S.N.D.T. Women’s University, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1996. Examines the Indic influences on Wilson and her philosophy.

McAlpine, Mary. The Other Side of Silence: A Life of Ethel Wilson. Madeira Park, British Columbia: Harbour Publishing, 1989. The first biography.

McMullan, Lorraine, ed. The Ethel Wilson Symposium. Ottowa: University of Ottowa Press, 1982. Papers presented at a conference held April 24–26, 1981, at the University of Ottawa, Canada. McMullan’s introduction is especially useful.

McPherson, Hugo. "Fiction: 1940-1960." In Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, edited by Carl Frederick Klinck. 2d ed. Vol. 2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Wilson’s fiction is discussed in the context of a supposed "search for identity" thought to infuse Canadian literature’s development in the mid-twentieth century. McPherson notes a contrary individuality in Wilson’s writing that transcends her failure at times to reconcile her creative impulses as both "artist and sibyl."

Mitchell, Beverley. "Ethel Wilson." In Canadian Writers and Their Works: Fiction Series, edited by Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Vol. 6. Toronto: ECW Press, 1985. Wilson’s life and complete works are thoroughly examined. An exhaustive bibliography follows Mitchell’s straightforward, readable analysis, making this study a must for Wilson readers.

Pacey, Desmond. Ethel Wilson. New York: Twayne, 1967. This thorough, readable overview of Wilson’s long and short fiction is not deeply analytical, but it does consider Wilson’s lightly ironic vision and her valuable contribution to Canadian literature despite her relatively short publishing history. Despite its age, the book still contains some useful insights. A selected bibliography and an index are included.

Woodcock, George. "Innocence and Solitude: The Fictions of Ethel Wilson." In Modern Times. Vol. 3. in The Canadian Novel, edited by John Moss. Toronto: NC Press, 1982. Woodcock discusses Wilson’s originality and vision as they are expressed in her novels and novellas.

Woodcock, George. "On Ethel Wilson." In The World of Canadian Writing: Critiques and Recollections. Vancouver, British Columbia: Douglas and McIntyre, 1980. Slightly revised since its 1974 publication, this reflective personal essay enumerates the strengths of Wilson’s personality and her unique works. This volume contains an index of the names of authors mentioned or treated in the book.