Ethel Wilson, Mrs. Golightly & Other Stories

No such thing as an essential BC author, it's only ever been a marketing tool, I mean honestly: except that there's no better term for Ethel Wilson, whose collection Mrs. Golightly & Other Stories has been my irregular companion over the last few weeks.

There are others, of course, some of whom have been even more helpful along the way to whatever it is that I've come to understand about my home place, this province, but every single one of those who was writing after about 1955 owes some of their perspective, vision, and ability to Wilson.

Someone else can write the history of Wilson's place in the BC university English curriculum (the selections up to individual professors, so many of whom chose Wilson's Swamp Angel: see Trish Talks Books for a thoughtful casual review), but her place there is utterly deserved. It was a wise, reasonable decision for Theresa Kishkan to build her novella The Weight of the Heart around Wilson and her fellow writer Sheila Watson, specifically in the fact that its main character is writing a graduate thesis on them, because in the 1970s and 1980s, both of them were being consistently taught and consistently read.

Still, there's nothing about Wilson's prose, narrative, or lyricism that would mean her fiction is best kept for academic readers. When you look at book bloggers' reviews of her work, you see again and again the appreciation that readers still have for her special blend of accessibility and hidden depths, humour and tragedy. 

It's not that Mrs. Golightly & Other Stories is all that complicated, and it's only just over 200 pages in its New Canadian Library edition (even with David Stouck's short but helpful afterword), but if you read it slowly enough, it does kind of feel like you've lived through a few decades of BC society.

It's tricky to write about the individual stories without giving things away, but if you've ever enjoyed a short story, you should try some of these. "From Flores," for example, about a December run by a fishboat from Flores Island to Port Alberni, conjures up more imagined world outside its mere ten pages than is in any way fair. At the other end of these stories' lengths, at 35 pages "Beware the Jabberwock, my son ... Beware the Jubjub bird" hits like a novel.

Some of the language is dated, of course, including the rendering of accent and dialect. On the other hand, Wilson questions and taunts assumptions about class and gender throughout. There's much more to some of Wilson's women than the men in their lives think there is, for example, but not always, and in any case a person shouldn't have to meet minimum qualifications before they're treated with respect.

In another world, or even just in a different summer, I'd write a whole essay about these stories' dogs, and another about all the birds tempted by windows (and the windows become mirrors), but somehow there isn't world enough nor time.

As I've said about a few other writers over the years, sometimes here or in print elsewhere, and sometimes in class or conversation, Ethel Wilson's BC is the BC I live in. Neither hers nor mine is the real world, exactly, but I'd argue that it's better for not being so. What else is imagination for, than looking for change in the world, unless it's looking to change it?