Hetty Dorval - Softcover

Ethel Wilson (1888-1980) is one of Canada's most distinguished novelists, on a par with Alice Munro, Carol Shields and Margaret Atwood. Although born in South Africa – her parents were English missionaries – she was brought up in England until, at the age of seven, she was orphaned; the rest of her long life, apart from her years at school in Liverpool, was spent in Vancouver as a teacher and as the wife of a local doctor. When she was nearly fifty she published some short stories, but did not write anything during the war because 'it was impossible in that terrible time to be trivial.' Hetty Dorval, her first novel, appeared in 1947; four more novels and a volume of short stories followed over the next fifteen years, including Swamp Angel (1954), to be published by Persephone Books in 2007.
In three weeks of 'passionate concentration' Hetty Dorval grew from 'the sage brush of British Columbia, from the hills and trees, from the rivers and a bridge, from a skein of honking Canada geese.' Near the small town of Lytton a young girl named Frankie meets and is befriended by the beautiful and enigmatic Mrs Dorval: 'we walked our horses side by side and she hardly seemed to know that I was beside her; she just took me for granted in a natural fashion.' But the local community has chosen not to 'know' Hetty ( 'a very ugly story had followed her from Shanghai to Vancouver and so to Lytton'), and Frankie has to deceive her parents when she visits her new friend; then confesses; and then, as she grows up and when she and Hetty meet each other years later in London must decide for herself what her attitude is.
This quiet, subtle, morally complex book is thus, in essence, the story of Frankie's growth from an innocent young girl into a morally aware adult. Hetty seems to have behaved unconventionally, indeed immorally. But is Frankie's adult perception to be preferred to that of her childish innocence?
There are many ways to read this novel. Is Hetty objectively a 'Menace'? Or is this a novel about the pernicious effect of gossip and about Donne's 'no man is an Iland' quoted on the frontispiece: Hetty has chosen to live outside Lytton and society, but must she be condemned for this? That Hetty is judged by others, and that Frankie comes to question these judgements, is the point of Hetty Dorval. But many will want to read this book twice before reaching a conclusion.
When asked about the influence of writers such as Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, Ethel Wilson said that indeed they were 'fine writers who are the objects of my admiration, but they do not affect me so strongly as some others. I find parts of Howards End and A Room with a View so flooded with light that that compels the little fever of admiration that I speak of.' In Persephone Books' view Ethel Wilson's work is flooded with a similar light.