Ethel Wilson (1888–1981) opened her first novelHetty Dorval (1937) with an epigraph from John Donne's seventeenth “Devotion”: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe” (Donne 1975, 87) — a conviction that would inform all her later writing. Displaying the theme of the individual embedded in society, this quotation has been interpreted by critics as an important clue to the oeuvre of a Canadian writer who has been variously and contradictorily described as “the most traditional, experimental, artless, and sophisticated” of Canada's writers (McPherson 1976, 219). Wilson's books were published at a time when Canadian literature was only beginning to achieve academic respectability, and her career ended just when the Canadian short story rose to prominence and became “the genre [through] which the explosive literary renaissance in Canada was probably made most apparent” (Nischik 1987, 233). Owing in part to the lack of interest in story collections among publishers at the time, Wilson's stories first appeared in periodicals; a collection of her short stories in book form — Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories — did not appear until 1961. In 1990, though, her works were reissued and canonized within the New Canadian Library Series.

Although Wilson's short stories have been anthologized relatively frequently, her published output — though of high quality — is relatively small, consisting of five short novels and only one short-story collection, as well as some essays and articles.Hetty Dorval was followed by the novels The Innocent Traveller (1949), The Equations of Love (1952), Swamp Angel (1954), Love and Salt Water (1956), as well as Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories (1961), all published by Macmillan. Two of her approximately thirty published stories have appeared since the publication of Mrs Golightly: “Simple Translation” and “A Visit to the Frontier.” Wilson also wrote a serialized children's story between March and June 1919. Her last novel “The Vat and the Brew” (according to critics, not up to her “usual standards,” see for example Mitchell 1993, 102, note 12) has never been published.