Ethel WilsonCritiques

I once read that Ethel Wilson was British Columbia's best novelist, and after reading this novel I can understand why. I've finished about 15 or 20 early British Columbia novels and this book was the greatest. The main character Maggie Lloyd is fully realized and Nell Severance was a memorable scene stealer. I was surprised by the evocation of British Columbia scenery as I was previously informed Ethel Wilson delved primarily into the interior life of her characters, and this was manifestly untrue. Many times I was surprised and delighted to read about the small revealing gestures and thoughts of people familiar to my experience and yet overlooked, little shocks of recognition. Once example was when Maggie couldn't recall the face of her first husband and I have recently had the same experience with a departed friend I knew well. Another was the gabby bus passenger and the perfect emphasis of her words. I look forward to reading the rest of Wilson's books.

I have read Ethel Wilson's later book, Swamp Angel, but nothing else by her. Although she is not so well known now, during her career Wilson was recognised as a gifted writer. She was awarded the Canada Council Medal in 1961 and the Lorne Pierce Medal of the Royal Society of Canada in 1964. Northrop Frye in the afterword to this book edition says that this book, her first, establishes Ethel Wilson's world and that many themes "are embryonic that are more deeply explored in later works." So it was interesting to me to read it after Swamp Angel which is a book that fully explores the themes of nature that are first developed in this book. Another common theme is the idea of a woman running away to hide in the interior of BC to get away from a bad situation.

Hetty Dorval is a beautiful woman who comes to the small town of Lytton when Frankie Burnaby is about twelve years old. She rents a house on a hill overlooking the Thompson River with only her housekeeper for company. Well, that's not exactly true; every so often a man comes to visit her and, as later events show, this man is not her husband. Frankie encounters Hetty when she is riding back to Lytton from her parents' ranch. Hetty is also riding and she starts a conversation with Frankie. Both of them are exhilarated by the sight of a skein of geese flying south overhead. Hetty invites Frankie back to her bungalow but she tells Frankie she doesn't want to have visitors so she asks Frankie to keep her visit a secret. Throughout the year Frankie visits when she can get away without arousing suspicion and thinks she hasn't been seen. But, in fact, one of the local Indians (as they were referred to when this book was written) has seen Frankie there and he mentions it to her father when he goes to do some work for him. This occasions a scene between Frankie and her parents and they tell her in no uncertain terms that Hetty Dorval is not a woman a young girl should be having contact with. Frankie agrees to stop seeing her but goes one last time to tell Hetty she won't be visiting any more. A few years pass while Frankie goes to a boarding school in Vancouver and then her parents decide to send her to school in England. On the boat to England they see Hetty once again. Hetty pleads with Frankie and her mother to not indicate they know her as she is about to be married to a nobleman. They do as she asks and some time later receive a brief letter thanking them. Frankie's mother has a godfather in Cornwall and that is where they head when the boat docks. There Frankie meets two people who will become important to her. Molly and Richard had been orphaned when Molly was five and Richard was eighteen. Their father's older brother, Mrs. Burnaby's godfather, took them in. Soon all three young people were as close as siblings. Frankie was probably in love with Richard and she felt like an older sister to Molly. A few years later they happened to encounter Hetty in London and, to Frankie's dismay, Hetty became close with the brother and sister. By this time Frankie knew some more of Hetty's history and how she made herself attractive to men and then used them. Frankie decides to confront Hetty to tell her to lay off Richard or she will disclose the sordid details of her life to him. Hetty decides to do her usual tactic of disappearing from scandal. She takes up with a rich Austrian and leaves for Vienna with him. This time she might not manage to create a new chapter in her life. It is 1939 you see and Austria is very shortly after invaded by the Germans.

Although the title is the name of one of the main characters the book is really a coming-of-age story about Frankie Burnaby. We see how she matures from the entranced young girl who thinks Hetty Dorval is wonderful to the wiser young woman who recognizes how dangerous Hetty can be. It's not a story that could be told now in the 21st century but for the time it was written it would have been reflective of the life of many young inexperienced girls. Its good to be reminded that the "good old days" had their perils too.½

This book has appeared on so many lists of Great Canadian books that I always felt bad I had not read it. Thanks to a friend I have now remedied that lack. And it is just as good as all the lists imply.

Maggie Vardoe is unhappily married. Edward Vardoe is her second husband; her first husband, Tom Lloyd, was an airman and died during World War II. Then her child died followed soon after by her father. She worked in a store that Edward Vardoe managed somewhere in New Brunswick and when he asked her to marry him she accepted. They then left New Brunswick and moved all the way to Vancouver where Edward works as a real estate agent. Maggie, who learned how to tie fishing flies from her father, decides to earn money to leave the marriage by making and selling flies. Finally she accumulates enough to give her a nest egg that will provide a bus ticket out of Vancouver into the interior of BC and some money to live on until she can land a job. The author's description of that bus ride and the people who sit beside Maggie would be enough to make reading the book worthwhile. But there is more, so much more. Maggie does find a job helping a couple run a fishing lodge in the mountains outside of Kamloops. She writes back to her old neighbours, Hilda and Mrs. Severance, to let them know where she is. Mrs. Severance, a former juggler in a circus, is quite the character. The book's title comes from a gun that she used in her juggling act. She sends the gun to Maggie after she has a fall outside her house and people see the gun. She is afraid the police will confiscate the gun so she sends it to Maggie with instructions to keep it until she dies and then toss it in the deepest part of the lake. Maggie's new life has its difficulties, such as the jealous wife of the owner, but she loves the land and the creatures in it. There is a lovely little description of a kitten and a young deer playing in the forest early one morning. It is so well described that I am sure Ethel Wilson must have seen something like this herself.

This book is only about 150 pages in the New Canadian Library edition that I read but it is a book that I took my time with in order that I could savour the text. Ethel Wilson didn't publish her first novel until she was 60. I haven't read anything else by her but I am eager to do so. This late bloomer is a wonderful addition to the literary world.

Narrated by Frances (Frankie) Burnaby, looking back on her girlhood from the perspective of her acquaintance with the seemingly glamorous r Hetty Dorval.
Frankie is just twelve, when the woman - and a stern female companion (?) come to live in her town in Canada. Inveigling invites, Frankie glories in her new companion; yet despite Hetty's instructions to keep their friendship secret, her parents find out...and find out, too, that Hetty has a "past" ..and end the association.
Yet as the years roll by, the two come into contact a few more times....
Hetty is the same throughout- though Frankie only gradually comes to gain a true picture of who Hetty Dorval is with maturity...½

As with most Canadian literature I found this book surprisingly good.

some very peculiar stories but she is original.

great character in aunt topaz. a good portrait of its time.

pleasantly surprised. i didn't really understand why the story about the swamp angel was there.½

Beautiful, quirky novel that offers a rare strong female protagonist who decides to choose her own fate and to let herself to "her own self be true." A woman who slips out of one life and into another one and yet who orchestrates that better life to boast good male and female cast members. I also like the fact that the backstories are not all plausible as can be, that we have to suspend our disbelief a bit. Sometimes are parents are not easily explained lawyers and teachers. A fast day-or-two read, this is a unique pleasure.

Written in 1950s. A woman plans and then carries out her plan to leave her husband. Her 2nd husband, whom she married out confusion and grief. Her first was killed in the war, and her little daughter also died. She took on as her second husband a cocky brash man, a selfish man, mistaking his confident extroversion for assured comptetence. He turns out to be a self centred little mean-spirited and spiteful man. And so the book opens with Maggie carrying out her domestic chores for the final time, then sneaking away after supper. She didnt even do the dishes. I like that part the best.
That was the the best part. The tension, wondering if her husband would figure out something was up before she could escape. She ends up in a fishing lodge in the wilderness of BC interior. This part is weaker. Probably this would have been a great short story, excised from the first half of the novel.

An affecting novel written in a lovely, confident, unpretentious style.

The story is a call to diligence, kindness, humility, etc., very Christian. But it's also a real adventure with a full cast, each perfectly rounded - an admirable feat in 150 paperback pages. And by "very Christian" I don't mean to disparage the novel's message. It's a brave novel that backs the Virtues so unflinchingly, and a very good novel that manages to do so without preaching or dissolving into treacle. The heroine's encounter with, and brushing-off of, a sleazy Greyhound passenger, and her plain-dealing with the pitiable, paranoiac wife of her employer, while veritable examples of a Good Woman, are also acknowledgments that good people exist in the real world, not in an ethically monochrome snowglobe.

The nature passages, descriptions of Vancouver and the B.C. interior, are very finely done. There is a rather mawkish scene with Bambi and a kitten, but it's counterbalanced by a marvelous depiction of fish-osprey-eagle competition. "Swamp Angel" is a novel that sees the balance, as well as the cruelty, in nature and applies it with a calm, Zen-like hand, to the fevers of human relations.

I'd probably have enjoyed this even more had I been a fisher. Yes, the allegory occasionally pokes through a bit!½

My third Ethel Wilson and the best so far. A perfect ten, in my view, with prose so beautiful I re-read pages at a time. A lovely young woman, Hetty Dorval, selfish, opportunistic, psychopathic, moves from Shanghai, through Canada, to London, in the years before the Second World War. In her wake she leaves a trail of discarded lovers, their outraged women folk, and Frankie Burnaby the 12 year old narrator of the novel with whom she regularly crosses paths. In a more than satisfactory final paragraph Wilson hints at a particularly ghastly ending to Ms Dorval's picaresque lifestyle. I gasped as I read it and yet my money remains on Hetty turning even that situation to her own advantage.

Written in 1950s. A woman plans and then carries out her plan to leave her husband. Her 2nd husband, whom she married out confusion and grief. Her first was killed in the war, and her little daughter also died. She took on as her second husband a cocky brash man, a selfish man, mistaking his confident extroversion for assured comptetence. He turns out to be a self centred little mean-spirited and spiteful man. And so the book opens with Maggie carrying out her domestic chores for the final time, then sneaking away after supper. She didnt even do the dishes. I like that part the best.That was the the best part. The tension, wondering if her husband would figure out something was up before she could escape. She ends up in a fishing lodge in the wilderness of BC interior. This part is weaker. Probably this would have been a great short story, excised from the first half of the novel.

Frankie Barnaby, the narrator of Hetty Dorval, is just entering adolescence when she meets the vivacious Hetty Dorval, a new arrival to Lytton, the small British Columbia town where Frankie lives and attends school during the week, going back to her parents on weekends. Mrs Dorval welcomes Frankie into her home, but warns her not to tell anyone of these visits, lest Hetty’s neighbors get the idea that she wants visitors, and the last thing she wants is visitors. “I will not be called upon. I will not have my life complicated here,” she declares. “I do not propose to spend my time paying attention to all sorts of people.”

Although Hetty claims the title of this book, the story is really all about Frankie’s growing up and her eventual understanding that people aren’t always what they seem. When Frankie is young, she can see Hetty’s glitz, glamour, and independence, but she does not see anything beyond the fun times they spend together. In fact, it’s not entirely clear to the reader whether Hetty is the “Menace” Frankie’s parents believe her to be. I couldn’t quite decide myself until the final chapters of the book.

Eventually, however, Frankie does learn the truth, and she must choose how to respond. Unlike Hetty, Frankie realizes that, as stated in the book’s epigraph by John Donne, “no man is an Iland, intire of it selfe.” Our choices, even seemingly trivial ones, do matter because our actions affect others. This is a “small” story of ordinary dramas, but it illustrates a big truth that is easy to forget in a world that prizes the independent spirit.

See my complete review at Shelf Love.

This book was beautiful, funny...I just moved away from Vancouver and I found that Wilson's descriptions of her arrival to the city from England were so realistic and so telling of my own experience of love-at-first-sight that I had to put it down for a while for fear of pining for what was...½

a reader's guide to the canadian novel NEW CANADIAN library