Although her literary oeuvre is relatively small, Sheila Watson (1909–98) has been recognized as one of the most important and influential writers in postwar Canada. Up until the early 1990s, she was known mainly for her novel The Double Hook, published in 1959. The scantness of her publications seems to apply to information about her life as well. In Stephen Scobie's words, “the major fact about Sheila Watson's biography is that she does not have one; or, rather, that she would regard it as irrelevant” (Scobie 1985, 259; see also Bessai and Jackel 1985). She was born into the family of the superintendent of the British Columbia Provincial Mental Hospital in New Westminster and was brought up in the Catholic faith — a background that is, despite Scobie's remark, of utmost importance in understanding her work. This is especially the case in relation to “Antigone,” as Watson herself states that her father insisted on a humane treatment regime for his patients, creating in the process an “experimental farm” rather than an asylum (Meyer and O'Riordan 1984, 165). She attended the University of British Columbia, receiving a B.A., a Teaching Certificate, and an M.A. in the early 1930s. She then worked as a teacher at various schools in British Columbia, including some very remote parts of the province, which provided the settings for her novels. She married the poet Wilfred Watson and attended the University of Toronto, where she completed her dissertation on the modernist writer Wyndham Lewis under the direction of Marshall McLuhan. Afterwards she and her husband took up teaching positions in the English Department at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Upon their retirement, the couple moved to the West Coast and settled on Vancouver Island, where Sheila Watson died in Nanaimo in 1998.

Only in 1992, when she was well into her eighties, did Sheila Watson finally publish a second novel, Deep Hollow Creek, which she had written much earlier, in the 1930s.