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Emily Carr is generally considered Canada’s most famous woman painter. This book was published in 1944, just a few months before her death at the age of 74 (she started writing relatively late in life when forced through ill health to curtail her painting). It tells the stories of her miserable life as a landlady in her native Victoria during the period 1913 to 1934. It includes stories of those hard-working days and evokes vivid pen-portraits of her tenants; young couples, widows, sad bachelors and rent evaders.
 
The book forms part of the Clarke Irwin Canadian Paperback series, and was released as an anniversary edition, in celebration of the centenary of her birth in 1871. The cover takes the concept of a bleak life in a small apartment building, and uses the simple open window as a metaphor for her longing to escape. Darkness pervades the room, with a bright green used to illuminate the outside world, hinting at a sense of optimism that lies beyond the building’s oppressive interior.

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