Life
She was born Sheila Martin Doherty at New Westminster, British Columbia. She grew up on the grounds of the provincial mental hospital where her father, Dr. Charles Edward Doherty, was the superintendent until his death in 1922.
After studying at Vancouver's Convent of the Sacred Heart, Sheila Doherty finished her university studies at the University of British Columbia, where she received her B.A. in 1931 and M.A. in 1933. She then worked as an elementary and high school teacher throughout British Columbia – including two years in Dog Creek (1935–1937), which served as a basis for her first novel, Deep Hollow Creek. She married Canadian poet Wilfred Watson in 1941.
Sheila Watson taught at Moulton Ladies College in Toronto between 1946 and 1948. From 1948 to 1950 she was a sessional lecturer at the University of British Columbia.
Watson wrote The Double Hook between 1952 and 1954 in Calgary and revised it during a year-long stay in Paris, from 1955 to 1956. She was unable to find a publisher. "T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, C. Day Lewis at Chatto & Windus, and Rupert Hart-Davis all turned it down."
In 1957 Watson began doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, writing her thesis on Wyndham Lewis under the direction of Marshall McLuhan. Her doctoral dissertation, Wyndham Lewis and Expressionism was finally completed in 1965. By then, though, Watson was already well known in Canadian academe.
In 1959 The Double Hook was published, and instantly recognized as a modern classic. "All 3,000 copies of the initial print run were sold. Supporters such as ... McLuhan, as well as Yale formalist Cleanth Brooks, saw it as a literary landmark ushering the Canadian novel out of its regional confines. Professor Fred Salter ... called it 'the most brilliant piece of fiction ever written in Canada'."
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation approached Watson to option the film rights to The Double Hook. However, because they would not give her veto rights over the script, she turned them down.
In 1961, Watson was hired as a professor of English at the University of Alberta. "In Edmonton the Watsons became part of an active circle of writers and established the literary magazine,The White Pelican in 1970 along with Douglas Barbour, Stephen Scobie, John Orrell, Dorothy Livesay, and artist Norman Yates." Watson remained the founding editor of the White Pelican for its brief existence (1971–1975). White Pelican Publications published Lions at her Face, the first book by Miriam Mandel, which won the Governor General's Award in 1973.
In 1984 Watson edited the Collected Poems of Miriam Mandel.
Watson retired in 1975. In 1976, she and her husband moved to Nanaimo, where they died in 1998.
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