Emily Carr Biography

Canadian painter and prose writer, born in Victoria, British Columbia. Canada's best-known woman artist, Carr studied painting in San Francisco, England, and Paris, but achieved wide-spread recognition only in her fifties. Her art is characterized by a passionate commitment to Native Canadian themes. She turned to writing when failing health forced her to curtail her work as a painter and potter. Her first book, Klee Wyck (1942), takes its title from the name (meaning ‘Laughing One’) given to her by her Nootka Indian friends; it is a collection of short stories which, like much of her art, celebrates the culture of the Native people of Canada's West Coast. Her other literary work offers vivid insights into later Victorian and early twentieth-century life on Vancouver Island; for example, The Book of Small (1942), and The House of All Sorts (1944), which describes Carr's experiences running a boarding house in Victoria, one of many ways in which she financed her career as a painter. Growing Pains (1946) is the first of a number of posthumously published and autobiographical works.