cover image The Emily Carr Omnibus

The Emily Carr Omnibus

Emily Carr. University of Washington Press, $40 (893pp) ISBN 978-0-295-97306-7

This mammoth omnibus by Canadian painter/writer Carr (1871-1945) is a discovery and a delight. Carr's modernist paintings of Northwest Indian peoples and their totems and of nature have won comparisons with Georgia O'Keeffe. Her seven books, all reprinted here, range from Klee Wyck (1941), spare stories of her forays into remote Native villages, to autobiographical recollections of growing up in pristine British Columbia and rebelling against her Victorian family, to Hundreds and Thousands (1966), her posthumous artistic journal. This vast scrapbook includes travel sketches on England and Paris, blackly comic vignettes based on Carr's 13 years as a harried landlady, a record of her 18 months in an English sanitorium, anecdotes, philosophical musings and uncanny psychological portraits of her beloved dogs, parrots, monkeys and other pets. Embraced in Canada as a feminist icon, Carr should gain many readers with this volume, even though, as art historian Shadbolt notes in her introduction, Carr often patronized native peoples, projecting on to them her romantic longings. Carr is a magical wordsmith whose gorgeous prose reflects a desire for simplicity even as it sensually mirrors life in its teeming complexity. (Nov.)