The Development of Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel: An Assessment of the Current State of Knowledge and Areas for Future Research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This project analyzes the development of Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel and assesses the ways in which a future critical edition of the novel could be more comprehensive than previously published editions. The history of this canonical Canadian novel has been left mostly unexplored and may have been intentionally concealed in some published editions. By inspecting archival materials, including Wilson’s correspondence, I examine how Wilson’s relationships with her editors influenced the different published versions of the novel, which feature two different endings to the story. This paper considers how Wilson’s friendship with John Gray, her editor at Macmillan, may have helped to produce a more poetic and Modernist version of the book in the original Canadian edition than in the American edition published by Harper, which were simultaneously published in 1954. The project also considers how some of Wilson’s publishers may have prioritized lower printing costs or convenience over publishing what they deemed to be the better version of the novel. Additionally, by examining Wilson’s manuscript, I discover that more than four different versions to the end of Wilson’s novel may have existed, as opposed to just two. Having studied ten versions of Wilson’s novel first-hand and the secondary resources most relevant to the development of Swamp Angel, such as the critical edition of the novel by Li-Ping Geng and the critical biography of Ethel Wilson by David Stouck, I suggest how a future critical edition of the novel could be more useful to scholars and more descriptive regarding the novel’s evolution.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".