Two icons rise before us: Virginia Woolf and Emily Carr. How can we relate such a formidable duo? Relating is such a slippery concept: relating (how to bring things together), or relating (how to tell about it)…any way you consider it, relating is a muddle, a tease, a torment. And time tangles it up, and space often means you simply can't get there from here. What do we do when we attempt to relate? Fill in the blanks? Build bridges? Mind the gap? Or leap over it? Build up a “whole structure of imagination” (TTL 176)? As ever, Woolf's words may guide us—or lead us astray:

Generations of scholars have set the stage for bringing Woolf and Carr into a complex, at times a bit fantastical, relationship. Most recently, within modernist studies, Diane Gillespie brought attention to Emily Carr and her writing on art in a section “The Gender of Modern/ist Painting” in Bonnie Kime Scott's Gender in Modernism. David Tovey, Marion Dell, and Marion Whybrow place Woolf and/or Carr in relation to communities of artists in St Ives. Masumi Usui in a brief, but compelling, essay, connects Carr and Woolf. My mission is to bring alive the creative process of relating the two icons. Might such a relating teach us to ask new questions and to startle the known into the new? How should I begin? “One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with…fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round [those two women] with” (TTL 201).

Scholarship & A Sketch of Facts Past

Scholarship, as the perfect hostess, demands, as part of the protocol of introduction, that we seek facts, actual connections, and, hopefully, evidence to connect Virginia Woolf and Emily Carr. Thus, I dug and dove into archives, scholarship, and timelines: The British Museum, the British Library, biographies, archives, holdings of The Royal Museum of British Columbia—and into caches and caches of vintage postcards gathered from shops and antique markets in St Ives.