Ethel Wilson (1888-1980) was born in South Africa but moved to England with her father after her mother's death. When her father died, she went to her grandmother in Vancouver. She gained a teaching certificate and taught elementary school before marrying. She was almost sixty when she published "Hetty Dorval" (1947). She also wrote "The Innocent Traveller" (1949), "The Equations of Love" (1952), "Swamp Angel" (1954), "Love and Salt Water" (1956), and "Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories" (1961).

   Swamp Angel was first published in 1954 and eventually became a Canadian classic. The novel and its heroine, Maggie Lloyd, played a part in inspiring such other classics as Margaret Laurence´s The Stone Angel and Carol Shields´ The Stone Diaries. Ethel Wilson´s lucidly spare and elegant prose tells a wonderfully crafted tale of jealousy, loyalty, and deliverance, at once regional and universal, realistic and philosophical. The story engages with themes of family, marriage, love, nature, religion, race, compassion, independence, and, above all, human understanding. Wilson´s masterful descriptions of the green world of the British Columbia interior continue to contribute much to the reader´s pleasure. As George Woodcock observed, "No other writer has more successfully evoked British Columbia as a place or its inhabitants as a strange and unique people than Ethel Wilson."
   The following writers contribute to this edition of Swamp Angel: Anjali Bhelande, Burke Cullen, Li-Ping Geng, Janet Giltrow, John Gray, W. J. Keith, and David Stouck.
   Li-Ping Geng is the editor of James Austen´s The Loiterer (2000) and The Novels of Henry Mackenzie (2005). He has taught English at universities in China and Canada, and is the Dean of the School of Foreign Languages at Yan Tai University.