The art of Emily Carr is exactly the same in her writing as in her pictures. It is the art of eliminating all but the essentials--the essentials for her, that is, the elements which contribute to her impression--and then setting these down in the starkest, most compressed form. She had no wish to paint, or to describe in words, the things around her as other people saw them; the camera and the phonograph could do that: it was not work for the artist. What she wanted was to study the things and the events which she felt contained material, until she had extracted that material and thrown everything else away.
KLEE WYCKBy fish-boat, gas-boat, sometimes by Indian canoe, taking with her a few books, at least one dog, and her sketching materials, Emily Carr visited the Indian communities of the British Columbia coast. Klee Wyck is a series of word-sketches about the Indians she lived with while she painted their totems and villages. (Winner of the Governor General's Award for non-fiction, 1941.)
THE BOOK OF SMALLThe tender, humorous recollections of the child Small--Emily herself. It is a vivid portrayal of the world of childhood and an imaginative re-creation of life in Victoria, B.C. in the 1870's.
THE HOUSE OF ALL SORTSThe artist's experiences as a landlady--the painful, comic, and touching incidents brought about by a houseful of guests and a kennel of English sheep dogs.
GROWING PAINSEmily Carr's story of her life. "This is probably the finest biography, in a literary sense, ever written in Canada."
© Permission of Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada.
Copyright. The National Library of Canada.
(Revised: 19 August 1997).
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