Adapted from:
Carr, Emily. Pause: An Emily Carr Sketch Book.
Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Co. Ltd., 1953.
From the Dust Jacket:
No one has captured the magnificence and solemnity of the British Columbia forests with greater success than Emily Carr. But when through failing health she could no longer go into the woods to paint, she began to work into literary form, notes she had jotted down over the years about her own life and work. Her first book, KLEE WYCK, won the Governor-General's award for general literature in 1941 and those which followed were acclaimed across Canada for their depth of insight and freshness of language. Of the large group of Emily Carr manuscripts left unpublished at her death, Pause: A Sketch Book is the first to be released by her literary executors. It was a particular favourite of the author herself and reveals all the brilliance and humanity of her earlier work.
While studying at the Westminster School in London in 1902, Emily Carr so undermined her own health by overwork that she "subsided into Sunhill Sanitorium with a limp and a stutter" for eighteen long months. Pause is the story of this enforced hiatus in her artistic development: the dreary, stultifying San routine, annoying doctors and devoted nurses, the foibles and courage of the patients. Emily Carr's active mind rebelled at San restrictions: "They gave us very little credit for having sense at Sunhill. We came here to pause our ordinary activities. Even thinking was prohibited." But her natural gaiety could not be defeated. She delighted all those around her with verses, cartoons, games and, most important of all, by her interest in the glorious songbirds of the English countryside which then engrossed her attention for the first time.
Because the rigid San formula--rest, fresh air, good food--prohibited the excitement and exhaustion that go with serious artistic effort, Emily Carr could not paint. During that year and a half her sole creative medium was a little black-covered sketchbook which has been preserved among her effects. In it she has drawn her companions both human and animal so engagingly and illustrated her diversions so fully that the sketchbook has been reproduced here also, virtually complete, in a series of thirty-nine plates set appropriately through the text. This intimate conjunction of manuscript and drawings makes Pause: A Sketch Book unique in the work of Emily Carr or indeed of any other Canadian author.
Return to top of page.© Public Domain.
Copyright. The National Library of Canada.
(Revised: 19 August 1997).
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