The fiction of Ethel Wilson occupies a special place in Canadian literature. Because she was born in the late nineteenth century but did not publish her first novel until almost mid twentieth century, her writing reflects both the religious and cultural values of her past and the uncertainties of the present in which she wrote. Thus in her novels the British Columbia landscape--the usually indifferent or hostile world of the present in which her characters must make their way--is enriched by the perspectives of time and place her upbringing provides.

Ethel Davis Bryant Wilson was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, of English parents. Her father, Robert William Bryant, was a Methodist minister; her mother, Eliza Lila Davis Malkin Bryant, came from a staunch Methodist family. In 1890, after her mother's death, she was taken to England by her father, and in 1898, following her father's death, she moved to...