Swamp Angel

By Ethel Wilson and George Bowering

Walking out on a demoralizing second marriage, Maggie Lloyd leaves Vancouver to work at a fishing lodge in the interior of British Columbia. But the serenity of Maggie’s new surroundings is soon disturbed by the irrational jealousy of the lodge-keeper’s wife. Restoring her own broken spirit, Maggie must also become a healer to others. In this, she is supported by her eccentric friend, Nell Severance, whose pearl-handled revolver – the Swamp Angel – becomes Maggie’s ambiguous talisman and the novel’s symbolic core.

Ethel Wilson’s best-loved novel, Swamp Angel first appeared in 1954. It remains an astute and powerful study of one woman’s integrity and of the redemptive power of compassion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 25, 2010
• ISBN: 9781551994109

Reviews for Swamp Angel

[mahallett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

pleasantly surprised. i didn't really understand why the story about the swamp angel was there.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book has appeared on so many lists of Great Canadian books that I always felt bad I had not read it. Thanks to a friend I have now remedied that lack. And it is just as good as all the lists imply.Maggie Vardoe is unhappily married. Edward Vardoe is her second husband; her first husband, Tom Lloyd, was an airman and died during World War II. Then her child died followed soon after by her father. She worked in a store that Edward Vardoe managed somewhere in New Brunswick and when he asked her to marry him she accepted. They then left New Brunswick and moved all the way to Vancouver where Edward works as a real estate agent. Maggie, who learned how to tie fishing flies from her father, decides to earn money to leave the marriage by making and selling flies. Finally she accumulates enough to give her a nest egg that will provide a bus ticket out of Vancouver into the interior of BC and some money to live on until she can land a job. The author's description of that bus ride and the people who sit beside Maggie would be enough to make reading the book worthwhile. But there is more, so much more. Maggie does find a job helping a couple run a fishing lodge in the mountains outside of Kamloops. She writes back to her old neighbours, Hilda and Mrs. Severance, to let them know where she is. Mrs. Severance, a former juggler in a circus, is quite the character. The book's title comes from a gun that she used in her juggling act. She sends the gun to Maggie after she has a fall outside her house and people see the gun. She is afraid the police will confiscate the gun so she sends it to Maggie with instructions to keep it until she dies and then toss it in the deepest part of the lake. Maggie's new life has its difficulties, such as the jealous wife of the owner, but she loves the land and the creatures in it. There is a lovely little description of a kitten and a young deer playing in the forest early one morning. It is so well described that I am sure Ethel Wilson must have seen something like this herself.This book is only about 150 pages in the New Canadian Library edition that I read but it is a book that I took my time with in order that I could savour the text. Ethel Wilson didn't publish her first novel until she was 60. I haven't read anything else by her but I am eager to do so. This late bloomer is a wonderful addition to the literary world.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As with most Canadian literature I found this book surprisingly good.

[yarb_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An affecting novel written in a lovely, confident, unpretentious style.The story is a call to diligence, kindness, humility, etc., very Christian. But it's also a real adventure with a full cast, each perfectly rounded - an admirable feat in 150 paperback pages. And by "very Christian" I don't mean to disparage the novel's message. It's a brave novel that backs the Virtues so unflinchingly, and a very good novel that manages to do so without preaching or dissolving into treacle. The heroine's encounter with, and brushing-off of, a sleazy Greyhound passenger, and her plain-dealing with the pitiable, paranoiac wife of her employer, while veritable examples of a Good Woman, are also acknowledgments that good people exist in the real world, not in an ethically monochrome snowglobe.The nature passages, descriptions of Vancouver and the B.C. interior, are very finely done. There is a rather mawkish scene with Bambi and a kitten, but it's counterbalanced by a marvelous depiction of fish-osprey-eagle competition. "Swamp Angel" is a novel that sees the balance, as well as the cruelty, in nature and applies it with a calm, Zen-like hand, to the fevers of human relations.I'd probably have enjoyed this even more had I been a fisher. Yes, the allegory occasionally pokes through a bit!

[thebookjunky · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Written in 1950s. A woman plans and then carries out her plan to leave her husband. Her 2nd husband, whom she married out confusion and grief. Her first was killed in the war, and her little daughter also died. She took on as her second husband a cocky brash man, a selfish man, mistaking his confident extroversion for assured comptetence. He turns out to be a self centred little mean-spirited and spiteful man. And so the book opens with Maggie carrying out her domestic chores for the final time, then sneaking away after supper. She didnt even do the dishes. I like that part the best.That was the the best part. The tension, wondering if her husband would figure out something was up before she could escape. She ends up in a fishing lodge in the wilderness of BC interior. This part is weaker. Probably this would have been a great short story, excised from the first half of the novel.