Sheila Watson

Sheila Martin Watson (born October 24, 1909 in New Westminster , † February 1, 1998 in Nanaimo ; born Sheila Martin Doherty ) was a Canadian writer , critic , publisher and lecturer . Her most important work is the novel The Double Hook (1959), which, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia, marks the starting point of modern Canadian literature.

Life and work

Watson was born Sheila Martin Doherty in New Westminster , British Columbia in 1909 . She was one of four children of Ida Mary Elwena Martin and Dr. Charles Edward Doherty. She grew up on the property of a mental hospital ( New Westminster Public Hospital for the Insane ), where her father worked until his death in 1920.

From 1921 she attended St. Ann's Academy in Vancouver and later the Sacred Heart Convent School. She finished her studies at the University of British Columbia in 1933 with an MA in English . In the fall of 1933, the poem The Barren Lands appeared her first publication - under the misspelled name Teila Martin Doherty . After her studies she worked as a teacher ( elementary school and high school ) in the rural areas of British Columbia, u. a. in Dog Creek in the Cariboo Mountains (1935-1937). On December 29, 1941, she married the student and Canadian poet Wilfred Watson.

Between 1938 and the early 1950s she wrote and revised her novel Deep Hollow Creek , in which she processed her time in Dog Creek. The novel was finally rejected by Clarke, Irwin & Co. in 1951 ; it was only published by McClelland & Stewart in 1992 and became a success.
In the 1950s, Watson published three interlinked stories (a fourth of which followed in 1970) in which she placed the family of the Sophoclean King Oedipus in a contemporary setting in rural British Columbia.

From 1946 to 1948 Watson taught at Moulton Ladies College in Toronto , and from 1948 to 1950 she was visiting professor at the University of British Columbia .

Between 1952 and 1954 she wrote her novel The Double Hook in Calgary and revised the manuscript from 1955 to 1956 during a stay in Paris . The English editors to whom she submitted the novel - u. a. TS Eliot ( Faber & Faber ) and Cecil Day-Lewis ( Chatto & Windus ) - declined to publish. The publisher Jack McClelland (McClelland & Stewart) saw “almost no market” for Watson's novel, but said that it was the kind of text that a publisher felt needed to be published (“it's the sort of thing that makes a publisher fell it must be published ”). He also trusted the reviewer Professor Fred Salters ( University of Alberta ), who predicted long-term success. The Double Hook was published in 1959 and immediately became a success: “All 3,000 copies of the first edition were sold [...] Marshall McLuhan, as well as the formalist Cleanth Brooks from Yale, saw it as a literary milestone that removed the Canadian novel from its regional borders "(" All 3,000 copies of the initial print run were sold [...] Marshall McLuhan, as well as Yale formalist Cleanth Brooks saw it as a literary landmark ushering the Canadian novel out of its regional confines. ")

Between 1957 and 1965 Watson studied at the University of Toronto and the University of Alberta in Edmonton . Supervised by Marshall McLuhan , she wrote her dissertation " Wyndham Lewis and Expressionism" on the British writer and painter Wyndham Lewis. In 1961 she became an English professor at the University of Alberta, where she taught until her retirement (1975).

In Edmonton, the Watsons founded the literary magazine The White Pelican (1971–1975) together with Douglas Barbour, Stephen Scobie, John Orrell, Dorothy Livesay and Norman Yates . In 1975 a collection of Sheila Watson's stories appeared in a special edition of the journal Open Letter . In 1976 she moved to Nanaimo with her husband, where she died in 1998.

Prices

In 1984 Watson received the Lorne Pierce Medal from the Royal Society of Canada . Her novel Deep Hollow Creek was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1992 .

Works (selection)

Novels

• The Double Hook , McClelland & Stewart (New Canadian Library): Toronto 1959, ISBN 0-7710-9998-3 .
• Deep Hollow Creek , McClelland & Stewart (New Canadian Library): Toronto 1992, ISBN 978-0-7710-8823-0 .

Stories

• "Rough Answer," in: The Canadian Forum 18/212 (1938), pp. 178-80.
• "Brother Oedipus", in: Queen's Quarterly (summer 1954), pp. 220-28
• "The Black Farm", in: Queen's Quarterly (Summer 1956), pp. 202-13.
• " Antigone, " in: The Tamarack Review (Spring 1959), pp. 5-13.
• "Sheila Watson: A Collection", in: Open Letter 3/1 (Winter 1974–75)
• A Father's Kingdom: The Complete Short Fiction , McClelland & Stewart (New Canadian Library): Toronto 2004, ISBN 0-7710-3488-1

Essays

• "Wyndham Lewis: A Question of Portraiture," in: The Tamarack Review , Fall 1963, pp. 90-98
• "The Great War: Wyndham Lewis and the Underground Press", in: arts / canada , Winter 1965, pp. 3-17
• "Canada and Wyndham Lewis the Artist," in: Canadian Literature, Winter 1968, pp. 44-61
• "Myth and Counter-myth", in: White Pelican. Winter 1974, pp. 7-19
• " Swift and Ovid : The Development of Metasatire," in: The Humanities Association Bulletin. Spring 1967, pp. 5-13
• " Gertrude Stein : The Style is the Machine", in: White Pelican , Fall 1973, pp. 6-14

Literature (selection)

• Joseph Pivato: Sheila Watson: Essays on Her Works. Guernica Ed., Montréal 2015 ISBN 978-1-550718-94-2
• Fred T. Flahiff, Always Someone to Kill the Doves: A Life of Sheila Watson . NeWest Publishers, Edmonton 2005 ISBN 978-1-896300-83-2
• Oliver Lovesey: The Place of the Journey in Randolph Stow 's "To The Islands" and Sheila Watson's "The Double Hook", in: Ariel, 27, 3, 1996 ISSN  1920-1222
• Glenn Willmott: The Nature of Modernism in "Deep Hollow Creek" , in: Canadian Literature, 146, 1995
• Donna Palmateer Pennee: Femicide in the Critical Construction of "The Double Hook". A Case Study in the Interrelations of Modernism, Literary Nationalism, and Cultural Maturity. Ph.D. Thesis, McGill University , Montreal 1994
• Glenn Deer: "The Double Hook". Miracle, Mystery, and Authority , in: Postmodern Canadian Fiction and the Rhetoric of Authority . McGill-Queen's UP, Montreal 1994, pp. 28-46
• Martin Kuester : (Post-) Modern Bricolage: Classical Mythology in Sheila Watson's Short Stories , Journal of English and American Studies, 42, 3, 1994, pp. 225-234
• Valerie Legge: Sheila Watson's “Antigone”: Anguished Rituals and Public Disturbances , in: Studies in Canadian Literature, 17, 2, 1992/1993, pp. 28-46
• Sherrill E. Grace: Sheila Watson and the 'Double Hook' of Expressive Abstraction , in: Regression and Apocalypse: Studies in North American Literary Expressionism . University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1989, pp. 185-209
• Stephen Scobie: Sheila Watson . ECW Press, Toronto 1985
• George Bowering (Eds.): Sheila Watson and "The Double Hook" . Golden Dog Press, Kempville (Ontario) 1985 ISBN 978-0-920802-75-5
• George Bowering: Sheila Watson, Trickster , in: John Moss, The Canadian Novel, 3: Modern Times . NC Press, Toronto 1982, pp. 209-23
• Diane Bessai, David Jackel Eds .: Figures in a Ground: Canadian Essays on Modern Literature. Collected in Honor of Sheila Watson. Western Producer Prairie Books, Saskatoon 1978
• Margot Northey, "Symbolic Grotesque: The Double Hook," in The Haunted Wilderness: Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Literature , University of Toronto Press , 1973

Web links

• Sheila Watson Fund : archival and manuscript collection at the John M. Kelly Library of the University of St. Michael's College in Toronto, accessed July 26, 2015
• Bibliography of the works of Sheila Martin Watson in the English-Canadian Writers project at Athabasca University , accessed on July 26, 2015 (English)
• Watson's dissertation "Wyndham Lewis and Expressionism" 1961 (PDF), accessed on July 26, 2015 (English)
• Sheila Watson's miniature And the Four Animals 1984 , accessed July 26, 2015

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Stephen Scobie, Sheila Martin Watson in The Canadian Encyclopedia, accessed on July 26, 2015 (English, optionally also French)
2. ↑ Anna St. Onge, The Sheila Watson Archives , p. 6 at: archive.org, accessed on July 26, 2015 (English).
3. ^ Anna St. Onge, The Sheila Watson Archives , p. 8 .
4. ↑ Anna St. Onge, The Sheila Watson Archives , p. 12 .
5. ^ Anna St. Onge, The Sheila Watson Archives , p. 22 .
6. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Sheila Watson in the English-Canadian Writers project at Athabasca University , accessed on July 26, 2015 (English)
7. ↑ ^{a b} Jordan Rendell Smith, How Sheila Watson's The Double Hook Caught On ( Memento of the original of July 24, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at: hpcanpub.mcmaster.ca, accessed July 26, 2015. 
8. ^ Anna St. Onge, The Sheila Watson Archives , p. 11 .
9. ^ Anna St. Onge, The Sheila Watson Archives , p. 19 .
10. ↑ Winner of the Lorne Pierce Medal ( Memento of the original from December 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at: rsc-src.ca, accessed on July 26, 2015 (English). 
11. ↑ Sheila Watson fonds ( Memento of the original from January 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at: stmikes.utoronto.ca, accessed on July 26, 2015.