Sheila Watson is important to Canadian letters as a novelist, a teacher, and a scholar. A person of strong, independent mind, originality and vitality of imagination, she has made an impression on Canadian intellectual life out of all proportion to her relatively small volume of published work. She is most widely known for her novel, The Double Hook, which has made its own place among the handful of Canadian books most often studied and considered essential by younger writers.

Sheila Watson was born Sheila Martin Doherty on 24 October 1909, in New Westminster, British Columbia, where her father was superintendent of the Provincial Mental Hospital. Watson lived there with her parents, Charles Edward and Elweena Martin Doherty, until 1932, when Dr. Doherty died. She took her schooling with the Sisters of St. Anne and the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Vancouver. The place this early experience has taken in her...