Ethel Wilson
Former residence, 1386 Nicola St.
"British Columbia stretched before her, exciting her with its mountains, its forests, the Pacific Ocean, the new little frontier town, and all the new people. Here was no time limit, no fortnight’s holiday. Here she had come to live..."
From The Innocent Traveller
Born in 1888, Ethel Wilson was Vancouver’s most respected novelist for several decades. In 1921 she married Dr. Wallace Wilson and they lived near here on Nicola Street, where she encouraged upcoming writers Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro. In her autobiographical story, The Innocent Traveller (1949), Wilson celebrates lifeguard Joe Fortes and his swimming lessons for children at English Bay, the poet Pauline Johnson and Siwash Rock in Stanley Park. She later lived in an apartment on Point Grey Road. Wilson spent her final eight years in the Arbutus Nursing Home where she died in 1980. B.C.’s top fiction award, The Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction, is named in her honour. Her two best-known novels are Hetty Dorval and Swamp Angel.
