Carr, Emily

(Canadian, 1871–1945)

Carr was born in Victoria, British Columbia. She studied art in San Francisco, London, and Paris and was recognized as Canada's leading woman painter from the 1930s on. She did not begin writing until 1937, when poor health interfered with her painting. Klee Wyck (1942) is the best of her books, drawing its richly episodic accounts of life among the native Canadian peoples from her expeditions to the wilds of Vancouver Island and elsewhere. ‘Klee Wyck’ is the name Carr was given by the Nootka Indians, in whose tongue it means ‘laughing one’. The Book of Small (1942) vividly re-creates her childhood and early life in late-Victorian British Columbia. Her other works include The House of All Sorts (1944), which recounts with gentle humour her years as the proprietor of a boarding-house in Victoria.

E. Annie Proulx. See CANADA  DH