What happens when an individual becomes the subject of many and divergent portraits?

"Biography," says Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, "is a deceptive genre. Positioned between fact and fiction and elusive in its purposes, biography displays an individual life, an existence patterned by conventions that have also shaped the reader's experience." In This Woman in Particular, Walker explores versions of Emily Carr's life that have appeared over the last half-century.

Walker contends that the biographical image of Emily Carr that emerges from an accumulation of...