Ethel Wilson

Ethel Wilson became a distinctive Canadian novelist through precise observation of family life, social convention, and British Columbia. The Innocent Traveller, first published in 1949, draws on stories about her own relatives to trace the long life of Topaz Edgeworth from Victorian England to Vancouver. Rather than building the book around one dramatic turning point, Wilson follows the accumulations of habit, movement, affection, and misunderstanding that define a family across decades. The novel's later New Canadian Library edition includes an afterword by poet P. K. Page. Wilson was born in South Africa, moved to England after her mother's death, and came to Vancouver as a child; she later taught before marrying Wallace Wilson. Her other fiction includes Hetty Dorval, Swamp Angel, and Love and Salt Water. The Innocent Traveller shows her gift for joining comedy to close social perception, allowing Topaz to be limited, energetic, exasperating, and deeply embedded in the lives around her without reducing her to a lesson or symbol.