Born in London, England, to Edgar and Catherine Smith, Catherine Anthony Smith immigrated to Canada in 1914 where, five years later, she married Leonard Clark and settled on a ranch in the mountainous Kootenay region of British Columbia. Here, for some thirty-two years, she juggled her responsibilities as a wife and mother of two children with her career as a writer. In 1950, at the age of fifty-eight, she published her first book, The Golden Pine Cone, an enchanting narrative which may well be Canada's first true fantasy, for it is dominated not by European goblins and elves but by the Ice Witch and the Pearl Folk, figures traditionally associated with the mythology of the Northwest Coast Indians whose lore permeates the British Columbia wilderness so familiar to Clark. Moreover, Clark does not make the traditional distinction between the real and the fantastic; both exist simultaneously in her novels, just...