Sheila Watson's first novel in 1959, The Double Hook, is renowned in Canadian literature as a breakthrough into modernity. It was also the first title in McClelland & Stewart's new original paperback series designed by Frank Newfield. Prompted by her experiences as a teacher in the community of Dog Creek near Ashcroft, this 116-page novella was actually preceded by another novel-length, Cariboo-based manuscript, Deep Hollow Creek, which was finally published in 1992. In Deep Hollow Creek a spinster schoolteacher goes 'to find life for herself' but encounters instead a claustrophic valley and enigmatic Shuswap Indians.

Born in New Westminster on October 24, 1909, Watson grew up in the vicinity of the Provincial Mental Hospital at Riverview (Essondale) where her father Charles Edward Doherty was chief doctor. In the 1930s she taught school at Dog Creek until the school was closed by the provincial government. She subsequently taught school at a high school at Langley Prairie for several years until she and other teachers were dismissed for trying to start a union. She then taught in Duncan on Vancouver Island. She persuaded a young sawmill worker and poet in the Victoria area to attend UBC. His name was Wilfred Watson. Educated at B.C. Catholic schools, she herself studied English at UBC and married Watson in 1941. The Watsons moved to Edmonton in the mid-1950s and she visited France in 1954. Attending the University of Toronto, she continued her graduate work under the supervision of Marshall McLuhan, who became a major influence on her husband's work as a poet and playwright. She wrote a thesis on Wyndham Lewis. She joined the English faculty at University of Alberta in 1961 and completed her doctorate in 1965. She later published two slim collections of short stories, Four Stories (Coach House, 1979) and Five Stories (Coach House, 1984). She retired from teaching in 1975. The couple moved to a bay north of Nanaimo in 1980 where she died in February of 1998, less than two months before her husband died. Appreciations of her work have been published by Angela Bowering, George Bowering, Frank Davey and Stephen Scobie, among others. Few Canadian writers have achieved as much critical renown on such a slim body of work.

F.T. Flahiff's biography Always Someone to Kill the Doves: A Life of Sheila Watson (NeWest Press, 2005 $34.95) emanates from their meeting as students in Marshall McLuhan's graduate seminar at the University of Toronto, where Flahiff taught at St. Michael's College until his retirement in 1999. 1-896300-83-9

[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2005] "Fiction" "Cariboo" "Classic"