One of Canada's most celebrated fantasists, Ruth Nichols admits that she always knew she would be a writer. As a child she wrote numerous long narratives, and in 1962, the year her parents, Edward and Ruby Smith Nichols, moved the family from her birthplace, Toronto, to Vancouver, she won the grand prize in the Shankar International Literary Contest for Children for a novelette about the childhood imprisonment of Catherine de' Medici. In 1969 she graduated from the University of British Columbia with an honors degree in religious studies. During her student years in Vancouver, she composed her first two books, both of which focus on the kind of heroine who dominates her subsequent fiction: the brilliant girl/woman who is desperately trying to integrate the many fragments of her identity.

Ceremony of Innocence (1969), composed first but published a few months later than A Walk out of the World, is a...