The Tightrope Walker: Autobiographical Writings of Anne Wilkinson

by Anne Wilkinson

Anne Wilkinson (1910-61) was one of the most celebrated Canadian writers of her time. Her success as a poet came against all odds: nothing in her background, from geography to genealogy, would have suggested a literary career. She lived her life and practiced her art in Toronto at a time when the nerve centre of Canadian poetry was unquestionably Montreal. She was born into the highest levels of Toronto society, a daughter of the very distinguished Osler family. And yet she wrote poetry, and was published to great acclaim, through decades of marriage, child-rearing, divorce, and illness.

From December 1947 to July 1956, the years during which she wrote her most successful poetry, Wilkinson kept journals; in due course she also wrote an autobiography, part of which appeared in a literary magazine shortly after she died. Joan Coldwell brings together the complete text of the autobiography with the poet's journals, some samples of her poetry, and a moving exchange of letters between Wilkinson and her mother.

The journals vividly reveal the inner workings of the writer's mind and her struggles to create in a difficult environment. With an immediacy and power that only journals can achieve, these writings explore the nature of the creative process in a context of daily realities that are often harsh and sometimes heart-breaking. The autobiography tells the story in a different way, rearranged to fit the forms of a ?legitimate? genre.

Together with Coldwell's introduction, these writings present a unique and moving self-portrait of a poet who died too young, at the peak of her career. This volume celebrates Wilkinson's life and work, and the spirit that informed them.

275 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Anne Cochran Wilkinson (née Gibbons) (September 21, 1910 – May 10, 1961) was a Canadian poet who was part of the modernist movement in Canadian poetry in the 1940s and 1950s, one of only a few prominent women poets of the time, along with Dorothy Livesay and P. K. Page. Wilkinson published two books of poetry, Counterpoint to Sleep (1951) and The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955). A founding editor and patron of the literary quarterly The Tamarack Review, she also wrote a family history, Lions in the Way (1956), about her maternal family, the Oslers, and a modern fairy tale for children, Swann and Daphne (1960), before her early death from cancer in 1961. Her work was anthologized in The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, appeared in several prominent Canadian literary journals of the day, including Northern Review and The Tamarack Review, was broadcast on CBC Radio's Anthology and recorded on the album Six Toronto Poets, alongside the works of W.W.E. Ross, Raymond Souster, Margaret Avison, James Reaney and Jay Macpherson. Forgotten for several decades, her work has enjoyed a minor revival since the publication in 2003 of Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924–1961, edited by Dean Irvine. - Wikipedia

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