Everything important came late in Emily Carr's life. Now she is recognized as one of the most vital modern Canadian painters, and her memoirs and diaries hold a high place among Canadian autobiographical writings. Yet she did not have her first major exhibition of paintings until she was fifty-six, after being ignored through the decades of hard work in which she formed her style. And she did not publish her first book until she was seventy. Indeed, she had only started writing a few years before then, when her health made it impossible for her to paint with such vigor as she had done in the past, and she needed a new channel through which her creative energies could flow. But when she did begin, she wrote immediately with the kind of ease that usually comes from years of practice, and she applied to her new art all...