Gilean Douglas : Writing Nature, Finding Home

Widely known and respected for her nature writing and poetry, Gilean Douglas was also a talented photographer, an accomplished gardener, an astute politician, an intrepid adventurer, a charismatic lover, and a feminist ahead of her time. Born in 1900 into a wealthy family and orphaned at sixteen, she rejected the expectations of the class and society into which she was born and made her own way in the world as an independent woman. Her writings span more than eighy years, from her childhood in the early 1900s through four marriages, ten years in the Cascade Mountain wilderness, and forty years on a homestead on Cortes Island, British Columbia, where she died in 1993. Gilean Douglas: Writing Nature, Finding Home is at once a biography and a collection of some of Douglas's best writings as poet, nature writer, and journalist. Included are illuminating excerpts from her diaries, letters, and unfinished autobiography, along with texts never before published. Both her personal life and her writings are abundantly illustrated with Douglas's own photographs. Like no other, Gilean Douglas's story illustrates the changing world for Canadian women in the twentieth century. Her work is a celebration of the Canadian landscape. This tribute to Douglas reacquaints friends and followers with her life and work, and introduces new readers to a fascinating and compelling voice.